
Class Ji^fl-i^ 
Book • n IS— 

CQEKRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



/ 



UNTO THIS LAST 



ON THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF 

POLITICAL ECONOMY 



BY 

JOHN RUSKIN 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

RICHARD T. ELY, LL.D. 

Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School 

of Economics and Political Science in the 

University of "VVisconsin 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



c 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two CoHiEfl Received 

JUL. 10 1901 

^ Copyright entry 
COPY Q. 



\A\'^ 






Copyright, 1901, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 



' •• • •• I 



CONTENTS 



ESSAY PAGE 

1. The Roots of Honor i 

II. The Veins of Wealth 37 

III. Qui Judicatis Terram 65 

IV. Ad Valorem loi 



"FRIEND, I DO THEE NO WRONG. DIDST NOT 
THOU AGREE WITH ME FOR A PENNY ? TAKE 
THAT THINE IS, AND GO THY WAY. I WILL GIVE 
UNTO THIS LAST EVEN AS UNTO THEE." 



"IF YE THINK GOOD, GIVE ME MY PRICE; AND 
IF NOT, FORBEAR. SO THEY WEIGHED FOR MY 
PRICE THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER." 



PREFACE 



I. The four following essays were published 
eighteen months ago in the " Cornhill Magazine," 
and were reprobated in a violent manner, as far 
as I could hear, by most of the readers they met 
with. 

Not a whit the less, I believe them to be the 
best, that is to say, the truest, rightest-worded, 
and most serviceable things I have ever written ; 
and the last of them, having had especial pains 
spent on it, is probably the best I shall ever 
write. 

"This," the reader may reply, "it might be, 
yet not therefore well written." Which, in no 
mock humility, admitting, I yet rest satisfied 
with the work, though with nothing else that I 
have done ; and purposing shortly to follow out 
the subjects opened in these papers, as I may 



X PREFACE. 

find leisure, I wish the introductory statements to 
be within the reach of any one who may care to 
refer to them. So I republish the essays as they 
appeared. One word only is changed, correct- 
ing the estimate of a weight ; and no word is 
added.^ 

2 . Although, however, I find nothing to modify 
in these papers, it is matter of regret to me that 
the most startling of all the statements in them 
- — that respecting the necessity of the organiza- 
tion of labor, with fixed wages — should have 
found its way into the first essay ; it being quite 
one of the least important, though by no means 
the least certain, of the positions to be defended. 
The real gist of these papers, their central mean 
ing and aim, is to give, as I believe for the first 
time in plain English, — it has often been inci- 
dentally given in good Greek by Plato and 

"^ Note to Second Edition. — An addition is made to the note 
in the fourteenth page of the preface of this book ; which, be- 
ing the most precious, in its essential contents, of all that I have 
ever written, I reprint word for word and page for page, after 
that addition, and make as accessible as I can, to all. 



PREFACE. xi 

Xenophon, and good 'Latin by Cicero and Horace, 
— a logical definition of wealth : such definition 
being absolutely needed for a basis of economical 
science. The most reputed essay on that subject 
which has appeared in modern times, after open- 
ing with the statement that " writers on political 
economy profess to teach, or to investigate,^ the 
nature of wealth," thus follows up the declaration 
of its thesis : '' Every one has a notion, suffi- 
ciently correct for common purposes, of what is 
meant by wealth." . . . '* It is no part of the 
design of this treatise to aim at metaphysical 
nicety of definition." - 

3. Metaphysical nicety we assuredly do not 
need ; but physical nicety, and logical accuracy, 
with respect to a physical subject, we as assuredly 
do. 

Suppose the subject of inquiry, instead of being 
House-law (^Oikonomia) , had been Star-law (As- 

^ Which ? for where investigation is necessary, teaching is 
impossible. 

'" Principles of Political Economy." By J. S. Mill. Pre- 
liminary remarks, p. 2. 



xii PREFACE. 

tronomta), and that, ignoring distinction between 
stars fixed and wandering, as here between wealth 
radiant and wealth reflective, the writer had be- 
gun thus : " Every one has a notion, sufficiently 
correct for common purposes, of what is meant 
by stars. Metaphysical nicety in the definition 
of a star is not the object of this treatise ; " — 
the essay so opened might yet have been far 
more true in its final statements, and a thousand- 
fold more serviceable to the navigator, than any 
treatise on wealth which founds its conclusions 
on the popular conception of wealth can ever 
become to the economist. 

4. It was, therefore, the first object of these 
following papers to give an accurate and stable 
definition of wealth. Their second object was 
to show that the acquisition of wealth was 
finally possible only under certain moral con- 
ditions of society, of which quite the first 
was a belief in the existence, and even, for 
practical purposes, in the attainability of 
honesty. 



PREFACE. xiii 

Without venturing to pronounce — since on 
such a matter human judgment is by no means 
conclusive — what is or is not the noblest 
of God's works, we may yet admit so much 
of Pope's assertion as that an honest man is 
among his best works presently visible, and, 
as things stand, a somewhat rare one ; but 
not an incredible or miraculous work ; still 
less an abnormal one. Honesty is not a dis- 
turbing force, which deranges the orbits of 
economy ; but a consistent and commanding 
force, by obedience to which — and by no 
other obedience — those orbits can continue 
clear of chaos. 

5. It is true, I have sometimes heard Pope 
condemned for the lowness instead of the 
height of his standard : " Honesty is indeed 
a respectable virtue ; but how much higher 
may men attain ! Shall nothing more be asked 
of us than that we be honest?" 

For the present, good friends, nothing. It 
seems that in our aspirations to be more than 



xiv PREFACE. 

that, we have to some extent lost sight of the 
propriety of being so much as that. What 
else we may have lost faith in, there shall 
be here no question ; but assuredly we have 
lost faith in common honesty, and in the 
working power of it. And this faith, with 
the facts on which it may rest, it is quite our 
first business to recover and keep : not only 
believing, but even by experience assuring our- 
selves, that there are yet in the world men 
who can be restrained from fraud otherwise 
than by the fear of losing employment;^ nay, 

^ " The effectual discipline which is exercised over a work- 
man is not that of his corporation, but of his customers. It is 
the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds 
and corrects his negligence." (" Wealth of Nations," Book I., 
chap. lo.) 

Note to Second Edition. — The only addition I will make to 
the words of this book shall be a very earnest request to any 
Christian reader to think within himself what an entirely damned 
state of soul any human creature must have got into, who 
could read with acceptance such a sentence as this, much 
more write it ; and to oppose to it, the first commercial words 
of Venice, discovered by me in her first church : 

" Around this temple,- let the Merchant's law be just, his 
weights true, and his contracts guileless." 

If any of my present readers think that my language in this 



PREFACE. XV 

that it is even accurately in proportion to the 
number of such men in any State, that the 
said State does or can prolong its existence. 

To these two points, then, the following es- 
says are mainly directed. The subject of the 
organization of labor is only casually touched 
upon ; because if we once can get a sufficient 
quantity of honesty in our captains, the organi- 
zation of labor is easy, and will develop itself 
without quarrel or difficulty ; but if we cannot 
get honesty in our captains, the organization 
of labor is forevermore impossible. 

6. The several conditions of its possibility 
I purpose to examine at length in the sequel. 
Yet, lest the reader should be alarmed by the 
hints thrown out during the following investi- 
gation of first principles, as if they were lead- 
note is either intemperate, or unbecoming, I will beg them to 
read with attention the eighteenth paragraph of " Sesame and 
Lilies ; " and to be assured that I never, myself, now use, in 
writing, any word which is not in my deliberate judgment, the 
fittest for the occasion. 
Venice, 

Sunday, iS March, i8jy. 



xvi PREFACE. 

ing him into unexpectedly dangerous ground, 
I will, for his better assurance, state at once 
the worst of the poUtical creed at which I 
wish him to arrive. 

(i.) First, that there should be training 
schools for youth established, at Government 
cost,^ and under Government discipline, over 
the whole country ; that every child born in the 
country should, at the parent's wish, be permitted 
(and, in certain cases, be under penalty required) 
to pass through them ; and that, in these schools, 
the child should, with other minor pieces of 
knowledge hereafter to be considered, impera- 
tively be taught, with the best skill of teaching 
that the country could produce, the following 
three things : 

J It will probably be inquired by near-sighted persons, out 
of what funds such schools could be supported. The expedi- 
ent modes of direct provision for them I will examine here- 
after ; indirectly, they would be far more than self-supporting. 
The economy in crime alone (quite one of the most costly 
articles of luxury in the modern European market), which such 
schools would induce, would suffice to support them ten times 
over. Their economy of labor would be pure gain, and that 
too large to be presently calculable. 



PREFACE. xvii 

{a) The laws of health, and the exercises en- 
joined by them. 

(/5) Habits of gentleness and justice ; and 

{c) The calling by which he is to live. 

(2.) Secondly, that in connection with thesQ 
training schools, there should be established 
also, entirely under Government regulation, man- 
ufactories and workshops for the production and 
sale of every necessary of life, and for the exer- 
cise of every useful art. And that, interfering no 
whit with private enterprise, nor setting any re- 
straints or tax on private trade, but leaving both 
to do their best, and beat the Government if they 
could, — there should, at these Government man- 
ufactories and shops, be authoritatively good and 
exemplary work done, and pure and true sub- 
stance sold ; so that a man could be sure, if he 
chose to pay the Government price, that he got 
for his money bread that was bread, ale that was 
ale, and work that was work. 

(3.) Thirdly, that any man or woman, or 
boy or girl, out of employment, should be at 



xviii PREFACE. 

once received at the nearest Government school, 
and set to such work as it appeared, on trial, 
they were fit for, at a fixed rate of wages deter- 
minable every year ; that, being found incapable 
of work through ignorance, they should be taught, 
or being found incapable of work through sick- 
ness, should be tended; but that being found 
objecting to work, they should be set, under 
compulsion of the strictest nature, to the more 
painful and degrading forms of necessary toil, 
especially to that in mines and other places of 
danger (such danger being, however, diminished 
to the utmost by careful regulation and disci- 
pline), and the due wages of such work be re- 
tained, cost of compulsion first abstracted — to 
be at the workman's command, so soon as he has 
come to sounder mind respecting the laws of 
employment. 

(4.) Lastly, that for the old and destitute, 
comfort and home should be provided; which 
provision, when misfortune had been by the 
working of such a system sifted from guilt, would 



PREFACE. xix 

be honorable instead of disgraceful to the re- 
ceiver. For (I repeat this passage out of my 
" Political Economy of Art," to which the reader 
is referred for farther detail ^) " a laborer serves 
his country with his spade, just as a man in the 
middle ranks of life serves it with sword, pen, or 
lancet. If the service be less, and therefore the 
wages during health less, then the reward when 
health is broken may be less, but not less honor- 
able ; and it ought to be quite as natural and 
straightforward a matter for a laborer to take his 
pension from his parish because he has deserved 
well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to 
take his pension from his country because he 
has deserved well of his country." 

To which statement I will only add, for con- 
clusion, respecting the discipline and pay of life 
and death, that, for both high and low, Livy's 
last words touching Valerius Publicola, " de pub- 



^ Now " A Joy for Ever " (vol. xi. of " The Revised 
Series"). Addenda, p. 143, ^*i 129 (and p. 165, ^^ 143, of the 
small edition). 



XX PREFACE. 

lico est elatus,'' ^ ought not to be a dishonorable 
close of epitaph. 

7. These things, then, I believe, and am about, 
as I find power, to explain and illustrate in their 
various bearings ; following out also what belongs 
to them of collateral inquiry. Here I state them 
only in brief, to prevent the reader casting about 
in alarm for my ultimate meaning ; yet requesting 
him, for the present, to remember that in a 
science dealing with so subtle elements as those 
of human nature, it is only possible to answer for 
the final truth of principles, not for the direct 
success of plans ; and that in the best of these 
last, what can be immediately accomplished is 
always questionable, and what can be finally ac- 
complished, inconceivable. 

Denmark Hill, 

10 fh May, 1862. 

P. Valerius, omnium consensu princeps belli pacisque 
artibus, anno post moritur ; gloria ingenti, copiis familiaribus 
adeo exiguis, ut funeri sumtus, deesset : de publico est elatus. 
Luxere matronse ut Brutum." — Lib. ii., c. xvi. 



INTRODUCTION. 



What the reader will get out of Ruskin will 
depend altogether upon the spirit with which he 
approaches this master. If he approaches Rus- 
kin with a disposition to be fault-finding, if he 
desires to show how many shortcomings and in- 
consistencies there are in Ruskin, he will find no 
difficulty in the discovery of defects, and he may 
be filled with a sense of his own importance as a 
successful critic of one held to be a light of the 
first order in the nineteenth century. He may 
say to himself: " Surely I never would have been 
guilty of such blunders ! " And it is true that 
thousands of readers of Ruskin never have com- 
mitted his mistakes and never will. But what of 
it? Commonplace minds have commonplace 
characteristics and keep well within the safe, 

(xxi) 



xxii " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

beaten track. They come and go, leave things 
as they find them, and are soon forgotten. If 
they are upright and well-meaning, they have per- 
formed a useful service. But they must not put 
themselves in the class of our Ruskins. They 
cannot measure him because they cannot reach 
high enough ! 

But the reader who approaches Ruskin with 
that sympathy which gives insight, and tries to 
learn from Ruskin the lessons which he has to 
teach the receptive mind, will be refreshed. 
Ruskin is not to be devoured blindly. With the 
wheat he offers us there is much chaff, but that 
may be brushed aside, and the wheat is precious 
food for the soul. 

" Unto this Last " is the chief economic work 
of a destructive character which Ruskin wrote, as 
" Fors Clavigera " and "Time and Tide " are his 
greatest constructive productions within the field 
of social economics. " Unto this Last *' clears 
away what Ruskin held to be errors to make 
room for positive truths. Yet " Unto this Last " 



INTRODUCTION. xxiii 

is far from being purely negative, for it is full of 
suggestions of reform. Nevertheless, its chief 
note is negative. . Ruskin found obstructions 
which he felt must be removed as preparations 
for the fair social structure which he hoped would 
some day be erected for the comfort of men. 
Destruction for the sake of destruction was some- 
thing so far away from the mind and heart of 
Ruskin that nothing of the kind suggests itself to 
the candid reader, even when he is startled by 
fiercest denunciation of wrong belief producing 
wrong practice. 

What is essential in all of Ruskin's writings is 
their ethical tone. " Unto this Last " is saturated 
with ethical feeling. Wrong conduct is hateful 
because it produces misery and is, moreover, 
hideous in its aspect ; whereas right conduct is 
beautiful to look upon and brings to the children 
of men happiness. A yearning for righteousness 
filled the soul of Ruskin as he wrote "Unto this 
Last," and this yearning of soul reveals itself 
plainly on every page. We may not always be 



xxiv " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

able to perceive the precise outcome of our every 
social act, but we can do the righteous thing, and 
in the end that will surely, be the beneficent 
thing, the thing that will do good to our own 
selves and to all others. Ruskin expresses this 
thought in these words in the second essay, 
"The Veins of Wealth" : "One thing only you 
can know, namely, whether this dealing of yours 
is a just and faithful one, which is all you need 
concern yourself about respecting it ; sure thus to 
have done your own part in bringing about ulti- 
mately in the world a state of things which will 
not issue in pillage or in death. And thus 
every question concerning these things merges 
itself ultimately in the great question of jus- 
tice." 

Ruskin, scientifically considered, is guilty of 
gross errors, and at the same time he reveals 
scientific .insight of a high order. Among his 
chief foes are the political economists. John 
Stuart Mill, in particular, is singled out for attack. 
Yet what a white soul had Mill ! and with what 



INTR OD UC TION. xx v 

rare devotion did he toil for social amelioration ! 
In the case of the political economists Ruskin 
lacked that insight of sympathy which is required 
for an appreciation of his own works. But 
Ruskin lost much, and the world lost much, be- 
cause he did not patiently build on the founda- 
tions which had already been laid instead of 
attempting their destruction. He did not differ 
as he thought that he did in his aims and aspira- 
tions from Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and 
John Stuart Mill. Equally with him they sought 
to promote human welfare. But Ruskin was a 
poet, and they were men of facts and of science. 
These economists had a diversity of aims and 
were guilty of many inconsistencies. But un- 
doubtedly each and every one of them sought an 
explanation of our actually existing economic life. 
What are the causes of the wealth of nations? 
This question they asked themselves, and their 
explanation did not mean to any one of them a 
justification of all that exists. They also sought 
to know the causes of poverty, and Malthus, a 



xxvi " UNTO THIS LASTr 

humane, warm-hearted man, busied himself 
especially with this question : Why are men poor 
and wretched? Ricardo examined into the 
operation of a few causes working under assumed 
conditions, but his abstractions were never in- 
tended to be a justification of oppression. John 
Stuart Mill endeavored to retain the work of his 
great predecessors and to prosecute inquiries into 
the methods of improving the lot of mankind, 
especially of the wage-earning classes and of 
women. But Ruskin was irritated by vicious 
practices and by much heartiessness which men 
justified on alleged grounds of political economy, 
and which, indeed, found a measure of justifica- 
tion in the mistakes of such great economists as 
those we have named ; but for which the chief 
responsibility rested in reality with certain far 
smaller men, who exaggerated the mistakes of 
the masters and omitted some of the better parts 
of their work for the sake of logical consistency. 
These smaller men are fitly called by the name of 
epigones, the followers-after, who create a tradi- 



INTR OD UC TION, xxvii 

tion of orthodoxy and stifle free thought, as well 
as generosity of action. 

It is true that economists have frequently been 
guilty of inconsistencies with respect to their 
fundamental purposes. Sometimes they have 
said : " We examine merely what is." But 
they have all examined as well into what they 
wished to be, and have allowed desire to influ- 
ence thought. Moreover, they have not always 
so written as to make it sufficiently clear to the 
average citizen and his representative in legisla- 
tive halls that the rules for wealth-accumulation 
are not the dominant rules of social action, but 
are subordinate to rules of human welfare. But 
we must not dwell longer on these considera- 
tions, interesting as they are. 

Ruskin knew precisely what he desired, and 
that was a society of happy, noble human beings, 
using material possessions for the highest ends. 
In the fourth lecture, " Ad Valorem," he tells us 
as follows what he regards as political economy : 
" The real science of political economy, which 



xxviii " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

has yet to be distinguished from the bastard 
scieiice, as medicine from witchcraft, and astron- 
omy from astrology, is that which teaches 
nations to desire and labor for the things that 
lead to life ; and which teaches them to scorn 
and destroy the things that lead to destruction." 
And in " Veins of Wealth " he tells us : '' The 
final outcome and consummation of all wealth is 
in the producing as many as possible full- 
breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human 
beings." And again in " Ad Valorem " he de- 
scribes in these words the richest nation and the 
richest man : " That country is the richest 
which nourishes the greatest number of noble 
and happy human beings ; that man is richest 
who, having perfected the functions of his own 
life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful in- 
fluence, both personal and by means of his pos- 
sessions, over the lives of others." 

Economists have frequently failed to discrim- 
inate sufficiently between the conditions of in- 
dividual well-being and the conditions of 



INTRO D UC TION. xxix 

general prosperity, and often we find in their 
writings an underlying assumption that whatever 
enriches the individual is for the advantage of 
the world at large. While the distinction be- 
tween the two lines of inquiry, namely, into 
the causes of individual riches and those of 
social wealth, could not altogether fail to escape 
any really great economist, it is true that this 
distinction has been inadequately presented in 
classical economic literature and has escaped 
the attention of the average well-to-do citizen 
who is inclined to believe that whatever enriches 
him enriches his neighbors likewise. Sometimes 
it does, and sometimes it does not. Ruskin did 
good service in sharply separating out the two 
lines of inquiry, and even if here, as elsewhere, 
he was guilty of exaggeration, he anticipated 
modern movements of scientific thought. He 
used the term " mercantile economy " for indi- 
vidual accumulation which does not " necessarily 
involve an addition to the actual property or 
well-being of the State in which it exists." Rus- 



XXX " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

kin frankly tells us that " mercantile economy " 
does not interest him, but that he proposes to in- 
quire into the causes of social prosperity, and 
this inquiry he styles political economy. 

We have already quoted one informal defini- 
tion of political economy, but in this place it is 
well to quote another, rather more formal, found 
in the lecture *' Veins of Wealth" : " Pohtical 
economy (the economy of a State, or of citizens) 
consists simply in the production, preservation, 
and distribution, at fittest time and place, of use- 
ful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts 
his hay at the right time ; the shipwright who 
drives his bolts well home in sound wood ; the 
builder who lays good bricks in well-tempered 
mortar; the housewife who takes care of her 
furniture in the parlor, and guards against all 
waste in her kitchen ; and the singer who rightly 
disciplines, and never overstrains her voice, are 
all poHtical economists in the true and final 
sense ; adding continually to the riches and 
well-being of the nation to which they belong." 



INTRODUCTION. xxxi 

How shall we bring about prosperity ? What 
must we do to produc'e the largest number of 
happy human beings? Ruskin tells us that to 
accomplish this we must renounce the policy of 
do-nothing, of letting things drift, and must be 
socially active, guiding and directing the work 
of men as they engage in their occupations. 
Human laws, Ruskin tells us, cannot withstand 
the flow of wealth. " They can only guide it ; 
but this the leading trench and the limiting 
mound can do so thoroughly that it shall be- 
come water of life — the riches of the hand of 
wisdom ; or, on the contrary, by leaving it to its 
own lawless flow, they may make it, what it has 
been too often, the last and deadliest of national 
plagues : water of Marah — the water which feeds 
the roots of all evil." 

But Ruskin perceived as clearly as John Stuart 
Mill that laws, institutions, and social direction 
are only in so far valuable as they act upon the 
habits, thoughts, feelings — in a word, the 
character — of the individual, and the individual 



xxxii " UNTO THIS LAST." 

is brought into connection with his home in a 
way which suggests quite recent sociological ten- 
dencies. " Note finally," says Ruskin, " that all 
effectual advancement towards this true felicity 
of the human race must be by individual, not 
public effort. Certain general measures may 
aid, certain revised laws guide, such advance- 
ment, but the measure and the law which have 
first to be determined are those of each man's 
home." 

While Ruskin is in places guilty of exaggera- 
tion, there are many fine distinctions in " Unto 
this Last " which later writers have not always 
perceived with equal clearness, and if we would 
appreciate our author we must direct our atten- 
tion to his keen, analytical power. Discrimina- 
tion is made by Ruskin between the just and 
legal means of acquiring wealth and mere indi- 
vidual acquisition, which may imply, sometimes 
does imply, social impoverishment and the deg- 
radation of others. There are good and bad 
sources of wealth, good and bad rich men, good 



INTRODUCTION. xxxiii 

and bad poor men. Wealth, like poverty, may be 
due to superior excellence or to unusual ethical 
inferiority. Noteworthy is this passage in which 
Ruskin describes those who now become rich or 
remain poor : " The persons who become rich \ 
are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, ^^ 
proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, 
unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The 
persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, 
the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the 
humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imagina- 
tive, the sensitive, the well-informed, the im- 
provident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, 
the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the 
entirely merciful, just, and godly person." 

We must next turn our attention to Ruskin's 
general philosophy of society as truly organic in 
character, with parts interdependent, mutually 
necessary, but unequal in rank and power. Un- 
less we clearly grasp this view of society, we shall 
be constantly puzzled by his social writings. 
Man thrives only in society. Man, isolated and 



xxxiv " UNTO THIS LAST." 

alone, the man who is truly individual and apart 
from his fellows, is really no man ; he is, as the 
Greeks called him, an '^idiotic" or "private" 
body, " whence finally our ' idiot,' meaning a 
person entirely occupied with his own concerns." 
The harmonious action of men in society requires 
government, and the existence of inequalities 
among men points to the rulership of the supe- 
rior. Ruskin is a democrat in the sense that he 
sympathizes sincerely and intensely with the 
masses in their sufferings and desires the eleva- 
tion of every man to conditions where he can 
enjoy the best and happiest life of which he is 
capable ; but Ruskin is an aristocrat in this, that 
he believes in the existence of natural classes and 
desires government of the people by the best, 
for the good of all. Not all inequality can be 
looked upon as beneficial, but only that rightly 
established and rightly used. In Ruskin's own 
words, "The eternal and inevitable law in this 
matter is that the beneficialness of the inequality 
depends first on the methods by which it was 



INTR OD UC TION. xxxv 

accomplished, and secondly on the purposes to 
which it is applied. Inequalities of wealth, un- 
justly established, have assuredly injured the 
nation in which they exist during their establish- 
ment ; and unjustly directed, injure it yet more 
during their existence. But inequalities of 
wealth, justly established, benefit the nation in 
the course of their establishment ; and, nobly 
used, aid it yet more by their existence. That is 
to say, among every active and well-governed 
people, the various strength of individuals, tested 
by full exertion and specially applied to various 
needs, issues in unequal but harmonious results, 
receiving reward or authority according to its 
class and service." 

But superior natural power and superior rank 
are not to be used for self, but for others. The 
leader must exercise leadership for those whom 
he leads, and must, if need be, die for them. 
This gives us an insight into the admiration that 
in spite of all our theories we still have for the 
soldier. He stands ready to die for us in the 



xxxvi " UNTO THIS LAST." 

discharge of duty, and the prospect of all the 
pleasures of life will not induce him to turn 
his back upon the foe when the order comes 
to advance. Ruskin would elevate business 
to the rank of a profession in which the 
I I thought of service of others, and not of self, is 
the animating motive. The soldier's profession 
is to defend the nation, " the pastor's to teach 
it, the physician's to keep it in health, the 
lawyer's to enforce justice in it, the merchant's to 
provide for it." And each one must die rather 
than fail in the discharge of duty. But what is 
the occasion of death for the business man? It 
is when the choice comes to him between death 
and faithlessness to engagements or failure to 
secure perfectness and purity in those things 
which he provides for the nation. And as a gov- 
ernor of men in his employ, the business man, 
merchant, or manufacturer has a measure of 
paternal authority and responsibility. As he 
would have his own son treated, so must he treat 
the sons of others who toil under his direction. 



JNTR OD UCTION. xxxvii 

Thus it is that Ruskin says that the following 
phrase sums up all the principles of his political 
economy : " Soldiers of the ploughshare as well 
as soldiers of the sword ; " and that they are like- 
wise summed up in this single sentence from 
" Modern Painters " : " Government and coop- 
eration are in all things the laws of life ; anarchy 
and competition the laws of death." 

Mention has already been made of Ruskin's 
scientific insight which led him^ years ago, to 
anticipate quite modern movements of economic 
thought. This is conspicuously the case with 
his treatment of consumption, in regard to which 
he has said things clearly resembling utterances 
which have been heard at an annual meeting of 
the American Economic Association. Further- 
more, his views of capital and utility suggest 
doctrines to-day widely held, and in the treat- 
ment of these concepts he criticises effectively 
the current views of his contemporaries. But 
with sound opinions are mingled strangely un- 
doubted errors, errors which are plainly incon- 



xxxviii " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

sistencies proceeding from misapprehension. He 
gives expression to an illuminating viev/ of utility 
and value, and then follows his exposition by the 
strange assertion that " value is independent of 
opinion and of quantity," whereas opinion is an 
essential element and excess of quantity may de- 
press value to zero. 

One of the parts of "Unto this Last" which is 
most faulty and full of inconsistencies is the 
treatment of exchange, in which he overlooks the 
essential significance in value of time and place, 
and makes a meaningless distinction between 
''profit" and "advantage." Another failure in 
Ruskin is his failure to distinguish between brute 
struggle and competition; or, if one will, between 
good and bad competition. 

But the limits of space for this introduction 
have already been reached. Fortunately we have 
one work which has the unique merit of a gener- 
ous and scientific presentation of Ruskin's eco- 
nomic and social views, and that is Mr. John A. 
Hobson's "John Ruskin, Social Reformer;" a 



INTRODUCTION. xxxix 

work which contributes materially to the value of 
Ruskin's writings. 

In conclusion we may say that after we have 
made due deduction for the many mistakes and 
even weaknesses of his writings, Ruskin remains 
one of the truly great figures in the Victorian age 
of English thinkers and reformers. He did much 
for England and for the entire world. The 
quickening of conscience to suffering and the 
world-wide efforts to elevate the masses owe 
much to Ruskin. And Ruskin did not accom- 
plish his work without pain. Like all noble 
natures, he carried a cross for others, and in his 
own body he bore the marks of his suffering. 
Ruskin ranks among the seers and prophets of 
England, and let us, for our own good, hear him 
and receive his message. 

Richard T. Ely. 
March, 1901. 



''UNTO THIS LAST." 



ESSAY I. 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 



I. Among the delusions which at different 
periods have possessed themselves of the minds 
of large masses of the human race, perhaps the 
most curious — certainly the least creditable — 
is the modern soi-disant science of political 
economy, based on the idea that an advantage- 
ous code of social action may be determined 
irrespectively of the influence of social affection. 

Of course, as in the instances of alchemy, 
astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular 
creeds, political economy has a plausible idea 
at the root of it. "The social affections," says 
the economist, , " are accidental and disturbing 
elements in human nature ; but avarice and the 
desire of progress are constant elements. Let 



2 " UNTO THIS last:' 

us eliminate the inconstants, and, considering 
the human being merely as a covetous machine, 
examine by what laws of labor, purchase, and 
sale the greatest accumulative result in wealth is 
obtainable. Those laws once determined, it will 
be for each individual afterwards to introduce as 
much of the disturbing affectionate element as 
he chooses, and to determine for himself the 
result on the new conditions supposed." 

2. This would be a perfectly logical and suc- 
cessful method of analysis if the accidentals 
afterwards to be introduced were of the same 
nature as the powers first examined. Supposing 
a body in motion to be influenced by constant 
and inconstant forces, it is usually the simplest 
way of examining its course to trace it first under 
the persistent conditions, and afterwards intro- 
duce the causes of variation. But the disturbing 
elements in the social problem are not of the 
same nature as the constant ones : they alter 
the essence of the creature under examination 
the moment they are added ; they operate, 'not 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. -. 

mathematically, but chemically, introducing con- 
ditions which render all our previous knowledge 
unavailable. We made learned experiments 
upon pure nitrogen, and have convinced our- 
selves that it is a very manageable gas : but, 
behold ! the thing which we have practically to 
deal with is its chlorides ; and this, the moment 
we touch it on our established principles, sends 
us and our apparatus through the ceiling. 

3. Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the 
conclusion of the science if its terms are ac- 
cepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as 
I should be in those of a science of gymnastics 
which assumed that men had no skeletons. It 
might be shown, on that supposition, that it 
would be advantageous to roll the students up 
into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch 
them into cables ; and that when these results 
were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton 
would be attended with various inconveniences 
to their constitution. The reasoning might be 
admirable, the conclusions true, and the science 



4 



''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



deficient only in applicability. Modern polit- 
ical economy stands on a precisely similar 
basis. Assuming, not that the human being 
has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it 
founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this 
negation of a soul ; and having shown the 
utmost that may be made of bones, and 
constructed a number of interesting geomet- 
rical figures with death's-head and humeri, 
successfully proves the inconvenience of the 
reappearance of a soul among these corpus- 
cular structures. I do not deny the truth 
of this theory : I simply deny its applicability 
to the present phase of the world. 

4. This inapplicabilfty has been curiously 
manifested during the embarrassment caused 
by the late strikes of our workmen. Here 
occurs one of the simplest cases, in a per- 
tinent and positive form, of the first vital 
problem which political economy has to deal 
with (the relation between employer and em- 
ployed) ; and, at a severe crisis, when lives 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. e 

in multitudes and wealth in masses are at 
stake, the political economists are helpless 
— practically mute : no demonstrable solution 
of the difficulty can be given by them, such 
as may convince or calm the opposing parties. 
Obstinately the masters take one view of the 
matter ; obstinately the operatives another ; 
and no political science can set them at one. 
5. It would be strange if it could, it being 
not by " science " of any kind that men were 
ever intended to be set at one. Disputant 
after disputant vainly strives to show that 
the interests of the masters are, or are not, 
antagonistic to those of the men: .none of 
the pleaders ever seeming to remember that 
it does not absolutely or always follow that the 
persons must be antagonistic because their 
interests are. If there is only a crust of 
bread in the house, and mother and children 
are starving, their interests are not the same. 
If the mother eats it the children want it ; if 
the children eat it the mother must go hungry 



6 " UNTO THIS LAST. " 

to her work. Yet it does not necessarily 
follow that there will be " antagonism " be- 
tween them, that they will fight for the crust, 
and that the mother, being strongest, will get 
it, and eat it. Neither, in any other case, 
whatever the relations of the persons may be, 
can it be assumed for certain that, because 
their interests are diverse, they must neces- 
sarily regard each other with hostility, and use 
violence or cunning to obtain the advantage. 
6. Even if this were so, and it were as just as 
it is convenient to consider men as actuated 
by no other moral influences than those which 
affect rats or swine, the logical conditions of 
the question are still indeterminable. It can 
never be shown generally either that the 
interests of master and laborer are alike, or 
that they are opposed ; for, according to cir- 
cumstances, they may be either. It is, indeed, 
always the interest of both that the work 
should be rightly done, and a just price ob- 
tained for it; but, in the division of profits, 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. y 

the gain of the one may or may not be the 
loss of the other. It is not the master's 
interest to pay wages so low as to leave the 
men sickly and depressed, nor the workman's 
interest to be paid high wages if the smallness 
of the master's profit hinders him from en- 
larging his business, or conducting it in a 
safe and liberal way. A stoker ought not 
to desire high pay if the company is too poor 
to keep the engine-wheels in repair. 

7. And the varieties of circumstance which 
influence these reciprocal interests are so end- 
less that all endeavor to deduce rules of action 
from balance of expediency is in vain. And 
it is meant to be in vain. For no human 
actions ever were intended by the Maker of 
men to be guided by balances of expediency, 
but by balances of justice. He has therefore 
rendered all endeavors to determine expe- 
diency futile for evermore. No man ever 
knew, or can know, what will be the ultimate 
result to himself, or to others, of any given 



8 " UNTO THIS LAST, " 

line of conduct. But every man may know, 
and most of us do know, what is a just and 
unjust act. And all of us may know also, 
that the consequences of justice will be ulti- 
mately the best possible, both to others and 
ourselves, though we can neither say what is 
best, or how it is likely to come to pass. 

I have said balances of justice, meaning, in 
the term "justice," to include affection, — ^such 
affection as one man owes to another. All right 
relations between master and operative, and all 
their best interests, ultimately depend on these. 

8. We shall find the best and simplest illus- 
tration of the relations of master and operative 
in the position of domestic servant. 

We will suppose that the master of a house- 
hold desires only to get as much work out 
of his servants as he can, at the rate of wages 
he gives. He never allows them to be idle ; 
feeds them as poorly and lodges them as ill 
as they will endure, and in all things pushes 
his requirements to the exact point beyond 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 9 

which he cannot go without forcing the servant 
to leave him. In doing this, there is no 
violation on his part of what is commonly 
called "justice." He agrees with the domestic 
for his whole time and service, and takes 
them ; — the limits of hardship in treatment 
being fixed by the practice of other masters 
in his neighborhood ; that is to say, by the 
current rate of wages for domestic labor. li 
the servant can get a better place he is free 
to take one, and the master can only tell 
what is the real market value of his laboi 
by requiring as much as he will give. 

This is the politico-economical view of the 
case, according to the doctors of that science j 
who assert that by this procedure the greatest 
average of work will be obtained from the 
servant, and therefore the greatest benefit to 
the community, and through the community, 
by reversion, to the servant himself. 

That, however, is not so. It would be so 
if the servant were an engine of which the 



lO ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

motive power was steam, magnetism, gravita- 
tion, or any other agent of calculable force. 
But he being, on the contrary, an engine whose 
motive power is a Soul, the force of this very 
peculiar agent, as an unknown quantity, enters 
into all the political economist's equations, 
without his knowledge, and falsifies every one 
of their results. The largest quantity of work 
will not be done by this curious engine for 
pay, or under pressure, or by help of any kind 
of fuel which may be supplied by the chaldron. 
It will be done only when the motive force, 
that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, 
is brought to its greatest strength by its own 
proper fuel : namely, by the affections. 

9. It may indeed happen, and does happen 
often, that if the master is a man of sense and 
energy, a large quantity of material work may 
be done under mechanical pressure, enforced 
by strong will and guided by wise method; 
also it may happen, and does happen often, 
that if the master is indolent and weak (how- 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. n 

ever good natured), a very small quantity 
of work, and that bad, may be produced by 
the servant's undirected strength and con- 
temptuous gratitude. But the universal law 
of the matter is that, assuming any given 
quantity of energy and sense in master and 
servant, the greatest material result obtainable 
by them will be, not through antagonism to 
each other, but through affection for each other ; 
and that if the master, instead of endeavoring 
to get as much work as possible from the 
servants, seeks rather to render his appointed 
and necessary work beneficial to him, and to 
forward his interests in all just and wholesome 
ways, the real amount of work ultimately done, 
or of good rendered, by the person so cared 
for, will indeed be the greatest possible. 

Observe, I say, " of good rendered," for a 
servant's work is not necessarily or always the 
best thing he can give his master. But good 
of all kinds, whether in material service, in 
protective watchfulness of his master's interest 



12 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

and credit, or in joyful readiness to seize un- 
expected and irregular occasions of help. 

Nor is this one whit less generally true 
because indulgence will be frequently abused, 
and kindness met with ingratitude. For the 
servant who, gently treated, is ungrateful, 
treated ungently, will be revengeful; and the 
man who is dishonest to a liberal master will 
be injurious to an unjust one. 

lo. In any case, and with any person, this 
unselfish treatment will produce the most effec- 
tive return. Observe, I am here considering 
the affections wholly as a motive power; not 
at all as things in themselves, desirable or 
noble, or in any other way abstractedly good. 
I look at them simply as an anomalous force, 
rendering every one of the ordinary political 
economist's calculations nugatory ; while, even 
if he desired to introduce this new element 
into his estimates, he has no power of dealing 
with it ; for the affections only become a true 
motive power when they ignore every other 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 13 

motive and condition of political economy. 
Treat the servant kindly, with the idea of 
turning his gratitude to account, and you will 
get, as you ^ deserve, no gratitude, nor any 
value for your kindness ; but treat him kindly 
without any economical purpose, and all eco- 
nomical purposes will be answered ; in this, as 
in all other matters, whosoever will save his 
life shall lose it, whoso loses it shall find it. ^ 

1 The difference between the two modes of treatment, and 
between their effective material results, may be seen very 
accurately by a comparison of the relations of Esther and 
Charhe in " Bleak House" with those of Miss Brass and the 
Marchioness in " Master Humphrey's Clock." 

The essential value and truth of Dickens' writings have 
been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely 
because he presents his truth with some color of caricature. 
Unwisely, because Dickens' caricature, though often gross, is 
never mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the 
things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think 
it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only 
for public amusement ; and when he takes up a subject of 
high national importance, such as that which he handled in 
"Hard Times," that he would use severer and more accurate 
analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several 
respects the greatest he has written) is with many persons 
seriously diminished because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic 
monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly 
master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead 
of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us 



14 



" UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



1 1 . The next clearest and simplest example of 
relation between master and operative is that 
which exists between the commander of a 
regiment and his men. 

Supposing the officer only desires to apply 
the rules of discipline so as, with least trouble 
to himself, to make the regiment most effective ; 
he will not be able, by any rules or admin- 
istration of rules, on this selfish principle, to 
develop the full strength of his subordinates. 
If a man of sense and firmness, he may, as 
in the former instance, produce a better result 
than would be obtained by the irregular kind- 
ness of a weak officer ; but let the sense and 
firmness be the same in both cases, and as- 
suredly the officer who has the most direct 

not lose the use of Dickens' wit and insight, because he 
chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right 
in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written ; 
and all of them, but especially "Hard Times," should be 
studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in 
social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, 
because partial, apparently unjust ; but if they examine all the 
evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, 
it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the 
finally right one, grossly and sharply told. 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 



IS 



personal relations with his men, the most care 
for their interests, and" the most value for their 
lives, will develop their effective strength, 
through their affection for his own person 
and trust in his character, to a degree wholly- 
unattainable by other means. This law appHes 
still more stringently as the numbers con- 
cerned are larger : a charge may often be 
successful, though the men dislike their offi- 
cers j a battle has rarely been won, unless 
they loved their general. 

12. Passing from these simple examples to the 
more complicated relations existing between a 
manufacturer and his workmen, we are met 
first by certain curious difficulties, resulting, 
apparently, from a harder and colder state of 
moral elements. It is easy to imagine an en- 
thusiastic affection existing among soldiers for 
the colonel. Not so easy to imagine an en- 
thusiastic affection among cotton-spinners for 
the proprietor of the mill. A body of men 
associated for purposes of robbery (as a High- 



1 6 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

land clan in ancient times) shall be animated 
by perfect affection, and every member of it be 
ready to lay down his life for the life of his chief. 
But a band of men associated for purposes of 
legal production and accumulation is usually 
animated, it appears, by no such emotions, 
and none of them are in any wise willing to 
give his life for the life of his chief. Not 
only are we met by this apparent anomaly, in 
moral matters, but by others connected with 
it, in administration of system. For a servant 
or a soldier is engaged at a definite rate of 
wages, for a definite period ; but a workman 
at a rate of wages variable according to the 
demand for labor, and with the risk of being 
at any time thrown out of his situation by 
changes of trade. Now, as, under these con- 
tingencies, no action of the affections can 
take place, but only an explosive action of 
^/j-affections, two points offer themselves for 
consideration in the matter : 

The first. How far the rate of wages may 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 17 

be so regulated as not to vary with the demand 
for labor. ' 

The second, How far it is possible that 
bodies of workmen may be engaged and main- 
tained at such fixed rate of wages (whatever 
the state of trade may be), without enlarging 
or diminishing their number, so as to give 
them permanent interest in the establishment 
with which they are connected, like that of 
the domestic servants in an old family, or an 
esprit de corps, like that of the soldiers in a 
crack regiment. 

1 3 . The first question is, I say, how far it may 
be possible to fix the rate of wages, irrespect- 
ively of the demand for labor. 

Perhaps one of the most curious facts in 
the history of human error is the denial by the 
common political economist of the possibility 
of thus regulating wages ; while, for all the 
important, and much of the unimportant, labor 
on the earth, wages are already so regulated. 

We do not sell our prime-ministership by 



1 8 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

Dutch auction ; nor, on the decease of a bishop, 
whatever may be the general advantages of 
simony, do we (yet) offer his diocese to the 
clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the 
lowest contract. We (with exquisite sagacity 
of political economy ! ) do indeed sell commis- 
sions ; but not openly, generalships : sick, we 
do not inquire for a physician who takes less 
than a guinea; litigious, we never think of 
reducing six-and-eightpence to four-and-six- 
pence ; caught in a shower, we do not can- 
vass the cabmen, to find one who values his 
driving at less than sixpence a mile. 

It is true that in all these cases there is, and. 
in every conceivable case there must be, ulti- 
mate reference to the presumed difficulty of the 
Work, or number of candidates for the office. 
If it were thought that the labor necessary 
to make a good physician would be gone 
through by a sufficient number of students 
with the prospect of only half-guinea fees, 
public consent would soon withdraw the un- 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 



19 



necessary half-guinea. In this ultimate sense 
the price of labor is indeed always regulated 
by the demand for it ; but, so far as the 
practical and immediate administration of the 
matter is regarded, the best labor always 
has been, and is, as all labor ought to be, 
paid by an invariable standard. 

14. "What!" the reader perhaps answers 
amazedly, '^ pay good and bad workmen ahke?" 

Certainly. The difference between one prel- 
ate's sermons and his successor's — or between 
one physician's opinion and another's — is far 
greater, as respects the qualities of mind in- 
volved, and far more important in result to you 
personally, than the difference between good 
and bad laying of bricks (though that is greater 
than most people suppose). Yet you pay with 
equal fee, contentedly, the good and bad work- 
men upon your soul, and the good and bad 
workmen upon your body; much more may 
you pay, contentedly, with equal fees, the 
good and bad workmen upon your house. 



20 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

" Nay, but I choose my physician, and (?) 
my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the 
quaUty of their work." By all means, also, 
choose your bricklayer; that is the proper 
reward of the good workman, to be " chosen." 
The natural and right system respecting all 
labor is, that it should be paid at a fixed 
rate, but the good workmen employed, and 
the bad workmen unemployed. The false, 
unnatural, and destructive system is when 
the bad workman is allowed to offer his 
work at half price, and either take the place 
of the good, or force him by his competition 
to work for an inadequate sum. 

15. This equality of wages, then, being the first 
object towards which we have to discover 
the directest available road, the second is, 
as above stated, that of maintaining constant 
numbers of workmen in employment, what- 
ever may be the accidental demand for ■ the 
article they produce. 

I believe the sudden and extensive inequali- 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 21 

ties of demand, which necessarily arise in the 
mercantile operations of an active nation, con- 
stitute the only essential difficulty which has 
to be overcome in a just organization of labor. 

The subject opens into too many branches 
to admit of being investigated in a paper of 
this kind ; but the following general facts 
bearing on it may be noted : 

The wages which enable any workman to 
live are necessarily higher if his work is liable 
to intermission than if it is assured and con- 
tinuous ; and however severe the struggle for 
work may become, the general law will always 
hold that men must get more daily pay if, 
on the average, they can only calculate on 
work three days a week than they would 
require if they were sure of work six days a 
week. Supposing that a man cannot live on 
less than a shilling a day, his seven shillings 
he must get, either for three days' violent 
work or six days' deliberate work. The ten- 
dency of all modern mercantile operations is 



2 2 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

to throw both wages and trade into the form 
of a lottery, and to make the workman's pay 
depend on intermittent exertion and the prin- 
cipal's profit on dexterously used chance. 

1 6. In what partial degree, I repeat, this may 
be necessary in consequence of the activities 
of modern trade, I do not here investigate ; 
contenting myself with the fact that in its 
fatallest aspects it is assuredly unnecessary, 
and results merely from love of gambling on 
the part of the masters, and from ignorance and 
sensuality in the men. The masters cannot 
bear to let any opportunity of gain escape them, 
and frantically rush at every gap and breach 
in the walls of Fortune, raging to be rich, and 
affronting, with impatient covetousness, every 
risk of ruin, while the men prefer three days 
of violent labor, and three days of drunken- 
ness, to six days of moderate work and wise 
rest. There is no way in which a principal 
who really desires to help his workmen may 
do it more effectually than by checking these 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 23 

disorderly habits both in himself and them ; 
keeping his own business operations on a scale 
which will enable him to pursue them securely, 
not yielding to temptations of jDrecarious gain ; 
and at the same time leading his workmen 
into regular habits of labor and life, either 
by inducing them rather to take low wages, in 
the form of a fixed salary, than high wages, 
subject to the chance of their being thrown 
out of work; or, if this be impossible, by dis- 
couraging the system of violent exertion for 
nominally high day wages, and leading the men 
to take lower pay for more regular labor. 

In effecting any radical changes of this kind, 
doubtless there would be great inconvenience 
and loss incurred by all the originators of the 
movement. That which can be done with per- 
fect convenience and without loss is not always 
the thing that most needs to be done, or which 
we are most imperatively required to do. 

17. I have already alluded to the difference 
hitherto existing between regiments of men 



24 "UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

associated for purposes of violence, and for 
purposes of manufacture ; in that the former 
appear capable of self-sacrifice — the latter, not ; 
which singular fact is the real reason of the 
general lowness of estimate in which the pro- 
fession of commerce is held, as compared with 
that of arms. Philosophically, it does not, at 
first sight, appear reasonable (many writers have 
endeavored to prove it unreasonable) that a 
peaceable and rational person, whose trade is 
buying and selling, should be held in less 
honor than an unpeaceable and often irrational 
person, whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless, 
the consent of mankind has always, in spite 
of the philosophers, given precedence to the 
soldier. 

And this is right. 

r' For the soldier's trade, verily and essen- 
tially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, 
without well knowing its own meaning, the 
world honors it for. A bravo's trade is slay- 
ing ; but the world has never respected bravoes 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 25 

more than merchants : the reason it honors 
the soldier is, because, he holds his life at the 
service of the State. Reckless he may be — 
fond of pleasure or adventure — all kinds of 
bye-motives and mean impulses may have 
determined the choice of his profession, and 
may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his 
daily conduct in it ; but our estimate of him is 
based on this ultimate fact — of which we are 
well assured — that put him in a fortress breach 
with all the pleasures of the world behind 
him and only death and his duty in front of him, 
he will keep his face to the front ; and he knows 
that his choice may be put to him at any moment 
— and has beforehand taken his part — virtually 
takes such part continually — does, in reality, 
die daily. 

18. Not less is the respect we pay to the 
lawyer and physician, founded ultimately on 
their self-sacrifice. Whatever the learning or 
acuteness of a great lawyer, our chief respect for 
him depends on our belief that, set in a judge's 



26 " UNTO THIS last:' 

seat, he will strive to judge justly, come of it 
what may. Could we suppose that he would 
take bribes, and use his acuteness and legal 
knowledge to give plausibility to iniquitous 
decisions, no degree of intellect would win for 
him our respect. Nothing will win it, short 
of our tacit conviction that in all important 
acts of his life justice is first with him : his own 
interest second. 

In the case of a physician, the ground of 
the honor we render him is clearer still. 
Whatever his science, we would shrink from 
him in horror if we found him regard his 
patients merely as subjects to experiment upon ; 
much more, if we found that, receiving bribes 
from persons interested in their deaths, he was 
using his best skill to give poison in the mask 
of medicine. 

Finally, the principle holds with utmost, 
clearness as it respects clergymen. No good- 
ness of disposition will excuse want of science 
in a physician, or of shrewdness in an advo- 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 27 

cate ; but a clergyman, even though his 
power of intellect be small, is respected on 
the presumed ground of his unselfishness and 
serviceableness. ^ 

19. Now, there can be no question but that 
the tact, foresight, decision, and other mental 
powers required for the successful manage- 
ment of a large mercantile concern, if not 
such as could be compared with those of a 
great lawyer, general, or divine, would at least 
match the general conditions of mind required 
in the subordinate officers of a ship, or of a 
regiment, or in the curate of a country parish. 
If, therefore, all the efficient members of the 
so-called liberal professions are still, somehow, 
in public estimate of honor, preferred before 
the head of a commercial firm, the reason must 
lie deeper than in the measurement of their 
several powers of mind. 

And the essential reason for such preference 
will be found to lie- in the fact that the mer- 
chant is presumed to act always selfishly. His 



2 8 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

work may be very necessary to the commu- 
nity j but the motive of it is understood to be 
wholly personal. The merchant's first object 
in all his dealings must be (the public believe) 
to get as much for himself, and leave as little 
to his neighbor (or customer) as possible. 
Enforcing this upon him, by political statute, 
as the necessary principle of his action ; rec- 
ommending it to him on all occasions, and 
themselves reciprocally adopting it, proclaim- 
ing vociferously, for law of the universe, that 
a buyer's function is to cheapen, and a seller's 
to cheat, — the public, nevertheless, involunta- 
rily condemn the man of commerce for his 
compliance with their own statement, and 
stamp him forever as belonging to an in- 
ferior grade of human personality. 

20. This they will find, eventually, they must 
give up doing. They must not cease to 
condemn selfishness ; but they will have to 
discover a kind of commerce which is not 
exclusively selfish. Or, rather, they will have 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 29 

to discover that there never was, or can be, 
any other kind of commerce ; that this which 
they have called commerce was not commerce 
at all, but cozening ; and that a true merchant 
differs as much from a merchant according 
to laws of modern political economy as the hero 
of the "Excursion" from Autolycus. They 
will find that commerce is an occupation which 
gentlemen will every day see more need to 
engage in, rather than in the businesses of 
talking to men, or slaying them ; that, in true 
commerce as in true preaching, or true fight- 
ing, it is necessary to admit the idea of occa- 
sional voluntary loss ; that sixpences have to 
be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of 
duty; that the market may have its martyr- 
doms as well as the pulpit, and trade its 
heroisms as well as war. 

May have — in the final issue, must have — 
and only has not had yet, because men of 
heroic temper have always been misguided in 
their youth into other fields : not recognizing 



30 



''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



what is in our days, perhaps, the most im- 
portant of all fields ; so that, while many a 
zealous person loses his life in trying to teach 
the form of a gospel, very few will lose a 
hundred pounds in showing the practice of 
one. 

21. The fact is, that people never have had 
clearly explained to them the true functions 
of a merchant with respect to other people. 
I should like the reader to be very clear 
about this. 

Five great intellectual professions, relating to 
daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed — 
three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation : 

The Soldier's profession is to defend it. 

The Pastor's to teach it. 

The Physician's to keep it in health. 

The Lawyer's to enforce justice in it. 

The Merchant's to provide for it. 

And the duty of all these men is, on due 
occasion, to die for it. 

" On due occasion," namely : 



riJE ROOTS OF HONOR. 31 

The Soldier, rather than leave his post 
in battle. 

The Physician, rather than leave his post 
in plague. 

The Pastor, rather than to teach Falsehood. 

The Lawyer, rather than countenance In- 
justice. 

The merchant — what is his "due occasion" 
of death? 

22. It is the main question for the merchant, \ 
as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does 
not know when to die, does not know how 
to live. / 

Observe, the merchant's function (or manu- 
facturer's, for in the broad sense in which it 
is here used the word must be understood to 
include both) is to provide for the nation. It is 
no more his function to get profit for himself 
out of that provision than it is a clergyman's 
function to get his stipend. This stipend is 
a due and necessary adjunct, but not the 
object of his life, if he be a true clergyman, 



32 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the 
object of life to a true physician. Neither is his 
fee the object of Hfe to a true merchant. All 
three, if true men, have a work to be done 
irrespective of fee — to be done even at any 
cost, or for quite the contrary of fee ; the 
pastor's function being to teach, the physician's 
to heal, and the merchant's, as I have said, to 
provide. That is to say, he has to understand 
to their very root the qualities of the thing he 
deals in, and the means of obtaining or pro- 
ducing it ; and he has to apply all his sagacity 
and energy to the producing or obtaining it in 
perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest 
possible price where it is most needed. 

And because the production or obtaining of 
any commodity involves necessarily the agency 
of many lives and hands, the merchant becomes 
in the course of his business the master and 
governor of large masses of men in a more 
direct, though less confessed way, than a 
military officer or pastor; so that on him falls. 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 33 

in great part, the responsibility for the kind 
of life they lead : and it becomes his duty, not 
only to be always considering how to produce 
what he sells, in the purest and cheapest forms, 
but how to make the various employments 
involved in the production or transference of 
it most beneficial to the men employed. 

23. And as into these two functions, requiring 
for their right exercise the highest intelligence, 
as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the 
merchant is bound to put all his energy, so 
for their just discharge he is bound, as soldier 
or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, 
his life, in such way as it may be demanded of 
him. Two main points he has in his providing 
function to maintain : first, his engagements 
(faithfulness to engagements being the real 
root of all possibilities, in commerce) ; and, 
secondly, the perfectness and purity of the 
thing provided ; so that, rather than fail in 
any engagement, or consent to any deterio- 
ration, adulteration, or unjust and exorbitant 



34 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



price of that which he provides, he is bound 
to meet fearlessly any form of distress, 
poverty, or labor, which may, through main- 
tenance of these points, come upon him. 

24. Again : in his office as governor of the 
men employed by him, the merchant or man- 
ufacturer is invested with a distinctly pater- 
nal authority and responsibility. In most cases, 
a youth entering a commercial establishment is 
withdrawn altogether from home influence ; his 
master must become his father, else he has, 
for practical and constant help, no father - at. 
hand. In all cases the master's authority, to- 
gether with the general tone and atmosphere 
of his business, and the character of the men 
with whom the youth is compelled in the- 
course of it to associate, have more immediate 
and pressing weight than the home influence, 
and will usually neutralize it either for good 
or evil; so that the only means which the 
master has of doing justice to the men 
employed by him is to ask himself sternly 



THE ROOTS OF HONOR. 35 

whether he is dealing with such subordinate 
as he would with his own son, if compelled 
by circumstances to take such a position. 

Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it 
right, or were by any chance obliged, to place 
his own son in the position of a common 
sailor : as he would then treat his son, he is 
bound always to treat every one of the men 
under him. So, also, supposing the master 
of a manufactory saw it right, or were by any 
chance obliged, to place his own son in the 
position of an ordinary workman : as he would 
then treat his son, he is bound always to treat 
every one of his men. This is the only 
effective, true, or practical Rule which can 
be given on this point of political economy. 

And as the captain of a ship is bound to 
be the last man to leave his ship in case of 
wreck, and to share his last crust with the 
sailors in case of famine, so the manufacturer, 
in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound 
to take the suffering of it with the men, and 
even to take more of it for himself than he 



36 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

allows his men to feel ; as a father would in 
a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself 
for his son. 

25. All which sounds very strange: the only- 
real strangeness in the matter being, never- 
theless, that it should so sound. For all this 
is true, and that not partially nor theoretically, 
but everlastingly and practically : all other 
doctrine than this respecting matters political 
being false in premises, absurd in deduction, 
and impossible in practice, consistently with 
any progressive state of national life ; all 
the life which we now possess as a nation 
showing itself in the resolute denial and 
scorn by a few strong minds and faithful 
hearts of the economic principles taught to 
our multitudes, which principles, so far as 
accepted, lead straight to national destruction. 
Respecting the mode^ and forms of destruction 
to which they lead, and, on the other hand, 
respecting the farther practical working of 
true polity, I hope to reason further in a 
following paper. 



ESSAY II. 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 



26. The answer which would be made by any 
ordinary poHtical economist to the statements 
contained in the preceding paper, is in few 
words as follows : 

" It is indeed true that certain advantages 
of a general nature may be obtained by the 
development of social affections. But political 
economists never professed, nor profess, to 
take advantages of a general nature into con- 
sideration. Our science is simply the science 
of getting rich. So far from being a fallacious 
or visionary one, it is found by experience to 
be practically effective. Persons who follow 
its precepts do actually become rich, and 
persons who disobey them become poor. 
Every capitalist of Europe has acquired his 
fortune by following the known laws of our 

(37) 



38 " UNTO THIS last:' 

science, and increases his capital daily by 
an adherence to them. It is vain to bring 
forward tricks of logic, against the force 
of accomplished facts. Every man of busi- 
ness knows by experience how money is 
made, and how it is lost." 

Pardon me. Men of business do indeed 
know how they themselves made their money, 
or how, on occasion, they lost it. Playing a 
long-practised game, they are familiar with the 
chances of its cards, and can rightly explain 
their losses and gains. But they neither know 
who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, 
nor what other games may be played with 
the same cards, nor what other losses and 
gains, far away among the dark streets, are 
essentially, though invisibly, dependent on 
theirs in the lighted rooms. They have 
learned a few, and only a few, of the laws 
of mercantile economy; but not one of those 
of political economy. 

2 7 . Primarily, which is very notable and curious. 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 39 

I observe that men of business rarely know 
the meaning of the word "rich." At least, if 
they know, they do not in their reasonings ] 
allow for the fact that it is a relative word, / 
implying its opposite " poor " as positively as 
the word " north " implies its opposite " south." 
Men nearly always speak and write as if riches \ 
were absolute, and it were possible, by follow- 
ing certain scientific precepts, for everybody 
to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like 
that of electricity, acting only through in- 
equalities or negations of itself. The force of 
the guinea you have in your pocket depends 
wholly on the default of a guinea in your 
neighbor's pocket. If he did not want it, it/ 
would be of no use to you ; the degree of 
power it possesses depends accurately upon 
the need or desire he has for it — and the 
art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary 
mercantile economist's sense, is therefore 
equally and necessarily the art of keeping your 
neighbor poor. 



40 



" UNTO THIS LAST." 



I would not contend in this matter (and 
rarely in any matter) for the acceptance of 
terms. But I wish the reader clearly and 
deeply to understand the difference between 
the two economies, to which the terms 
" Political " and " Mercantile " might not 
unadvisedly be attached. 

28. Political econdmy (the economy of a State, 
or of citizens) consists simply in the produc- 
tion, preservation, and distribut-ion, at fittest 
time and place, of useful or pleasureable things. 
The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time ; 
the shipwright who drives his bolts well 
/ home in sound wood ; the builder who lays 
good bricks in well-tempered mortar; the 
housewife who takes care of her furniture in 
the parlor, and guards against all waste in 
her kitchen; and the singer who rightly dis- 
ciplines, and never overstrains her voice, are 
all political economists in the true and final 
sense ; adding continually to the riches and 
well-being of the nation to which they belong. 



/ 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 41 

But mercantile economy, the economy of 
" merces " or of " pay,'-' signifies the accumu- 
lation, in the hands of individuals, of legal or 
moral claim upon, or power over, the labor 
of others ; every such claim implying precisely 
as much poverty or debt on one side as it 
implies riches or right on the other. 

It does not, therefore, necessarily involve an 
addition to the actual property or well-being 
of the State in which it exists. But since this 
commercial wealth, or power over labor, is 
nearly always convertible at once into real 
property, while real property is not always 
convertible at once into power over labor, 
the idea of riches among active men in civilized 
nations generally refers to commercial wealth ; 
and in estimating their possessions, they rather 
calculate the value of their horses and fields 
by the number of guineas they could get for 
them than the value of their guineas by the 
number of horses and fields they could buy 
with them. 



42 



« UNTO THIS last:' 



29. There is, however, another reason for this 
habit of mind, namely, that an accumulation 
of real property is of little use to its owner, 
unless, together with it, he has commercial 
power over labor. Thus, suppose any person 
to be put in possession of a large estate of 
fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its 
gravel ; countless herds of cattle in its pastures ; 
houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of 
useful stores ; but suppose, after all, that he 
could get no servants? In order that he may 
be able to have sei-vants, some one in his 
neighborhood must be poor, and in want of 
his gold — or his corn. Assume that no one 
is in want of either, and that no servants are 
to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own 
bread, make his own clothes, plough his own 
' ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His 
gold will be as useful to him as any other 
yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must 
rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat 
no more than another man could eat, and wear 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 43 

no more than another man could wear. He 
must lead a life of seVere and common labor 
to procure even ordinary comforts ; he will 
be ultimately unable to keep either houses in 
repair, or fields in cultivation ; and forced to 
content himself with a poor man's portion of 
cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert 
of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and 
encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he 
will hardly mock at himself by calHng " his 
own." 

30. The most covetous of mankind would, with 
small exultation, I presume, accept riches of 
this kind on these terms. What is really 
desired, under the name of riches, is, essen- 
tially, power over men ; in its simplest sense, 
the power of obtaining for our own advantage 
the labor of servant, tradesman, and artist ; 
in wider sense, authority of directing large 
masses of the nation to various ends (good, 
trivial, or hurtful, according to the mind of 
the rich person). And this power of wealth 



44 



" UNTO THIS LAST." 



of course is greater or less in direct proportion 
to the poverty of the men over whom it is 
exercised, and in inverse proportion to the 
number of persons who are as rich as ourselves, 
and who are ready to give the same price for 
an article of which the supply is limited. If 
the musician is poor he will sing for small 
pay as long as there is only one person who 
can pay him ; but if there be two or three 
he will sing for the one who offers him most. 
And thus the power of the riches of the patron 
(always imperfect and doubtful, as we shall see 
presently (§ 39), even when most authoritative) 
depends first on the poverty of the artist, and 
then on the limitation of the number of equally 
wealthy persons who also want seats at the 
concert. So that, as above stated, the art of 
becoming "rich," in the common sense, is not 
absolutely nor finally the art of accumu- 
lating much money for ourselves, but also of 
contriving that our neighbors shall have 
less. In accurate terms, it is " the art of 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 45 

establishing the maximum inequality in our 
own favor." ' 

31. Now, the establishment of such inequality 
cannot be shown in the abstract to be either 
advantageous or disadvantageous to the body 
of the nation. The rash and absurd assump- 
tion that such inequalities are necessarily 
advantageous lies at the root of most of the 
popular fallacies on the subject of political 
economy. For the eternal and inevitable law 
in this matter is, that the beneficialness of the 
inequality depends, first, on the methods by 
which it was accomplished ; and, secondly, on 
the purposes to which it is applied. Inequalities 
of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly 
injured the nation in which they exist during 
their establishment ; and, unjustly directed, 
injure it yet more during their existence. But 
inequalities of wealth, justly established, benefit 
the nation in the course of their establishment ; 
and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their 
existence. That is to say, among every active 



46 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

and well-governed people the various strength 
of individuals, tested by full exertion and 
specially applied to various need, issues in un- 
equal but harmonious results, receiving reward 
or authority according to its class and service ; ^ 

1 1 have been naturally asked several times with respect to 
the sentence in the first of these papers, " the bad workmen 
unemployed," " But what are you to do with your bad unem- 
ployed workmen ? " Well, it seems to me the question might 
have occurred to you before. Your housemaid's place is 
vacant — you give twenty pounds a year — two girls come for 
it, one neatly dressed, the other dirtily ; one with good recom- 
mendations, the other with none. You do not, under these 
circumstances, usually ask the dirty one if she will come for 
fifteen pounds, or twelve; and, on her consenting, take her 
instead of the well-recommended one. Still less do you try to 
beat both down by making them bid against each other, till you 
can hire both, one at twelve pounds a year, and the other at 
eight. You can simply take the one fittest for the place, and 
send away the other, not perhaps concerning yourself quite as 
much as you should with the question which you now impa- 
tiently put to me, " What is to become of her ? " For, all that 
I advise you to do is deal with workmen as with servants ; and 
verily the question is of weight : " Your bad workman, idler, 
and rogue — what are you to do with him ? " 

We will consider of this presently : remember that the 
administration of a complete system of national commerce and 
industry cannot be explained in full detail within the space of 
twelve pages. Meantime, consider whether, there being con- 
fessedly some difficulty in dealing with rogues and idlers, it 
may not be advisable to produce as few of them as possible. 
If you examine into the history of rogues you will find they 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 47 

while, in the inactive or ill-governed nation, 
the gradations of decay and the victories of 
treason work out also their own rugged system 
of subjection and success ; and substitute for 
the melodious inequalities of concurrent power 
the iniquitous dominances and depressions of 
guilt and misfortune. ^ 

32. Thus the circulation of wealth in a nation 
resembles that of the blood in the natural 
body. There is one quickness of the current 
which comes of cheerful emotion or wholesome 
exercise ; and another which comes of shame 
or of fever. There is a flush of the body 
which is full of warmth and life ; and another 
which will pass into putrefaction. 

The analogy will hold down even to minute 
particulars. For as diseased local determina- 

arc as truly manufactured articles as anything else, and it is 
just because our present system of political economy gives so 
large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may know it to 
be a false one. We had better seek for a system which will 
develop honest men, than for one which will deal cunningly 
with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools, and we shall 
find little reform needed in our prisons. 



48 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

tion of the blood involves depression of the 
general health of the system, all morbid local 
action of riches will be found ultimately to 
involve a weakening of the resources of the 
body politic. 

The mode in which this is produced may 
be at once understood by examining one or 
two instances of the development of wealth 
in the simplest possible circumstances. 

33. Suppose two sailors cast away on an un- 
inhabited coast, and obliged to maintain them- 
selves there by their own labor for a series 
of years. 

If they both kept their health, and worked 
steadily and in amity with each other, they 
might build themselves a convenient house, 
and in time come to possess a certain quan- 
tity of cultivated land, together with various 
stores laid up for future use. All these 
things would be real riches or property; 
and, supposing the men both to have worked 
equally hard, they would each have right to 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 49 

equal share or use of it. Their political 
economy would consist merely in careful pres- 
ervation and just division of these posses- 
sions. Perhaps, however, after some time 
one or other might be dissatisfied with the 
results of their common farming; and they 
might in consequence agree to divide the land 
they had brought under the spade into equal 
shares, so that each might thenceforward work 
in his own field, and live by it. Suppose that 
after this arrangement had been made, one of 
them were to fall ill, and be unable to work on 
his land at a critical time — say of sowing or 
harvest. 

He would naturally ask the other to sow or 
reap for him. 

Then his companion might say, with per- 
fect justice, " I will do this additional work 
for you ; but if I do it you must promise 
to do as much for me at another time. I 
will count how many hours I spend on your 
ground, and you shall give me a written prom- 



^o " UNTO THIS last:' 

ise to work for the same number of hours on 
mine, whenever I need your help, and you are 
able to give it." 

34. Suppose the disabled man's sickness to 
continue, and that under various circum- 
stances, for several years, requiring the help 
of the other, he on each occasion gave a 
written pledge to work as soon as he was 
able, at his companion's orders, for the same 
number of hours which the other had given 
up to him. What will the positions of the 
two men be when the invalid is able to resume 
work ? 

Considered as a "Polls," or state, they will 
be poorer than they would have been other- 
wise : poorer by the withdrawal of what the 
sick man's labor would have produced in 
the interval. His friend may perhaps have 
toiled with an energy quickened by the en- 
larged need, but in the end his own land 
and property must have suffered by the 
withdrawal of so much of his time and 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. ^I 

thought from them : and the united property 
of the two men will be certainly less than it 
would have been if both had remained in 
health and activity. 

But the relations in which they stand to 
each other are also widely altered. The sick 
man has not only pledged his labor for some 
years, but will probably have exhausted his 
own share of the accumulated stores, and 
will be in consequence for some time de- 
pendent on the other for food, which he can 
only " pay " or reward him for by yet more 
deeply pledging his own labor. 

Supposing the written promises to be held 
entirely valid (among civilized nations their 
validity is secured by legal measures'), the 

The disputes which exist respecting the real nature of 
money arise more from the disputants examining its functions 
on different sides than from any real dissent in their opinions. 
All money, properly so called, is an acknowledgment of debt ; 
but as such, it may either be considered to represent the 
labor and property of the creditor, or the idleness and pen- 
ury of the debtor. The intricacy of tne question has been 
much increased by the (hitherto necessary) use of marketable 
confimodities, such as gold, silver, salt, shells, etc., to give in- 
trinsic value or security to currency; but the final and best 



52 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

person who had hitherto worked for both 
might now, if he chose, rest altogether, and 
pass his time in idleness, not only forcing his 
companion to redeem all the engagements he 
had already entered into, but exacting from 
him pledges for further labor, to an arbitrary 
amount, for what food he had to advance to him. 
35. ^There might not, from first to last, be the 
least illegality (in the ordinary sense of the 
word) in the arrangement; but if a stranger 
arrived on the coast at this advanced epoch 
of their political economy he would find one 
man commercially Rich; the other commer- 
cially Poor. He would see, perhaps with no 
small surprise, one passing his days in idle- 
ness ; the other laboring for both, and living 
sparely, in the hope of recovering his indepen- 
dence at some distant period. 

definition of money is that it is a documentary promise ratified 
and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quan- 
tity of labor on demand. A man's labor for a day is a bet- 
ter standard of value than a measure of any produce, 
because no produce ever maintains a consistent rate of pro- 
ductibility. 



THE VEINS OE WEALTH. 53 

This is, of course, an example of one only 
out of many ways in which inequality of pos- 
session may be established between different 
persons, giving rise to the mercantile forms 
of Riches and Poverty. In the instance be- 
fore us, one of the men might from the first 
have deliberately chosen to be idle, and to 
put his life in pawn for present ease ; or he 
might have mismanaged his land, and been 
compelled to have recourse to his neighbor 
for food and help, pledging his future labor 
for it. But what I want the reader to note 
especially is the fact, common to a large 
number of typical cases of this kind, that the 
establishment of the mercantile wealth which 
consists in a claim upon labor, signifies a 
political diminution of the real wealth which 
consists in substantial possessions. 

36. Take another example, more consistent 
with the ordinary course of affairs of trade. 
Suppose that three men, instead of two, formed 
the little isolated republic, and found them- 



54 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



selves obliged to separate, in order to farm 
different pieces of land at some distance from 
each other along the coast : each estate furnish- 
ing a distinct kind of produce, and each more 
or less in need of the material raised on the 
other. Suppose that the third man, in order 
to save the time of all three, undertakes 
simply to superintend the transference of 
commodities from one farm to the other; 
on condition of receiving some sufficiently 
remunerative share of every parcel of goods 
conveyed, or of some other parcel received 
in exchange for it. 

If this carrier or messenger always brings 
to each estate, from the other, what is chiefly 
wanted, at the right time, the operations of the 
two farmers will go on prosperously, and the 
largest possible result in produce, or wealth, 
will be attained by the little community. But 
suppose no intercourse between the land- 
owners is possible, except through the travel- 
ling agent; and that after a time this agent, 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 55 

watching the course of each man's agriculture, 
keeps back the articles with which he has 
been entrusted until there comes a period 01 
extreme necessity for them, on one side or 
other, and then exacts in exchange for them 
all that the distressed farmer can spare of 
other kinds of produce : it is easy to see that 
by ingeniously watching his opportunities he 
might possess himself regularly of the greater 
part of the superfluous produce of the two 
estates, and at last, in some year of severest 
trial or scarcity, purchase both for himself 
and maintain the former proprietors thence- 
forward as his laborers or servants. 

37. This would be a case of commercial 
wealth acquired on the exactest principles of 
modern political economy. But more distinctly 
even than in the former instance, it is manifest 
in this that the wealth of the State, or of the 
three men considered as a society, is collect- 
ively less than it would have been had the 
merchant been content with juster profit. The 



56 " UNTO THIS last:' 

operations of the two agriculturists have been 
cramped to the utmost ; and the continual 
limitations of the supply of things they wanted 
at critical times, together with the failure of 
courage consequent on the prolongation of a 
struggle for mere existence, without any sense 
of permanent gain, must have seriously dimin- 
ished the effective results of their labor; 
and the stores finally accumulated in the 
merchant's hands will not in any wise be of 
equivalent value to those which, had his 
dealings been honest, would have filled at once 
the granaries of the farmers and his own. 

The whole question, therefore, respecting not 
only the advantage, but even the quantity, of 
national wealth, resolves itself finally into one 
of abstract justice. It is impossible to con- 
clude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, 
merely by the fact of its existence, whether 
it signifies good or evil to the nation in the 
midst of which it exists. Its real value de- 
pends on the moral sign attached to it, just 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 



57 



as sternly as that of a mathematical quantity 
depends on the algebraical sign attached to it. 
Any given accumulation of commercial wealth 
may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful 
industries, progressive energies, and productive 
ingenuities : or, on the other, it may be in- 
dicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, 
ruinous chicane. Some treasures are heavy 
with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest 
with untimely rain ; and some gold is brighter 
in sunshine than it is in substance. 

T^Z. And these are not, observe, merely moral 
or pathetic attributes of riches, which the 
seeker of riches may, if he chooses, despise ; 
they are, literally and sternly, material attri- 
butes of riches, deprecating or exalting, incal- 
culably, the monetary signification of the sum 
in question. One mass of money is the out- 
come of action which has created — another, of 
action which has annihilated — ten times as 
much in the gathering of it ; such and such 
strong hands have been paralyzed, as if they 



58 " UNTO THIS last:* 

had been numbed by nightshade : so many 
strong men's courage broken, so many pro- 
ductive operations hindered; this and the 
other false direction given to labor, and lying 
image of prosperity set up, on Dura plains 
dug into seven-times-heated furnaces. That 
which seems to be wealth may in verity be 
only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin; a 
wrecker's handful of coin gleaned from the 
beach to which he has beguiled an argosy; a 
camp-follower's bundle of rags unwrapped 
from the breasts of goodly soldiers dead ; the 
purchase-pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall 
be buried together the citizen and the stranger. 
And, therefore, the idea that directions can 
be given for the gaining of wealth, irrespect- 
ively of the consideration of its moral sources, 
or that any general and technical law of pur- 
chase and gain can be set down for national 
practice, is perhaps the most insolently futile 
of all that ever beguiled men through their 
vices. So far as I know, there is not in history 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 



59 



record of anything so disgraceful to the human 
intellect as the modern idea that the commer- 
cial text, " Buy in the cheapest market and 
sell in the dearest," represents, or under any 
circumstances could represent, an available 
principle of national economy. Buy in the 
cheapest market ? — yes ; but what made your 
market cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among 
your roof timbers after a fire, and bricks may 
be cheap in your streets after an earthquake ; 
but fire and earthquake may not therefore be 
national benefits. Sell in the dearest? — yes, 
truly ; but what made your market dear ? You 
sold your bread well to-day : was it to a dying 
man who gave his last coin for it, and will 
never need bread more ; or to a rich man who 
to-morrow will buy your farm over your head ; 
or to a soldier on his way to pillage the bank 
in which you have put your fortune? 

None of these things you can know. One 
thing only you can know : namely, whether this 
dealing of yours is a just and faithful one, 



6o " UNTO THIS LASTr 

which is all you need concern yourself about 
respecting it ; sure thus to have done your 
own part in bringing about ultimately in the 
world a state of things which will not issue 
in pillage or in death. And thus every ques- 
tion concerning these things merges itself 
ultimately in the great question of justice, 
which, the ground being thus far cleared for 
it, I will enter upon in the next paper, leaving 
only, in this, three final points for the reader's 
consideration. 

39. It has been shown that the chief value and 
virtue of money consists in its having power 
over human beings ; that, without this power, 
large material possessions are useless, and to 
any person possessing such power, compara- 
tively unnecessary. But power over human 
beings is attainable by other means than by 
money. As I said a few pages back (§ 30), 
the money power is always imperfect and 
doubtful; there are many things which can- 
not be reached with it, others which cannot 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 6i 

be retained by it. Many joys may be given 
to men which cannot be bought for gold, 
and many fidelities found in them which 
cannot be rewarded with it. 

Trite enough — the reader thinks. Yes; but 
it is not so trite — I wish it were — that in this 
moral power, quite inscrutable and immeasur- 
able though it be, there is a monetary value just 
as real as that represented by more ponderous 
currencies. A man's hand may be full of 
invisible gold, and the wave of it, or the grasp, 
shall do more than another's with a shower of 
bullion. This invisible gold, also, does not 
necessarily diminish in spending. Political 
economists will do well some day to take 
heed of it, though they cannot take measure. 

But farther. Since the essence of wealth 
consists in its authority over men, if the ap- 
parent or nominal wealth fail in this power, it 
fails in essence ; in fact, ceases to be wealth at 
all. It does not appear lately in England, that 
our authority over men is absolute. The ser- 



62 " UNTO THIS last:' 

vants show some disposition to rush riotously 
upstairs, under an impression that their wages 
are not regularly paid. We should augur ill of 
any gentleman's property to whom this hap- 
pened every other day in his drawing-room. 

So, also, the power of our wealth seems 
limited as respects the comfort of the servants, 
no less than their quietude. The persons in 
the kitchen appear to be ill-dressed, squalid, 
half-starved. One cannot help imagining that 
the riches of the establishment must be of a 
very theoretical and documentary character. 

40. Finally. Since the essence of wealth con- 
sists in power over men, will it not follow that 
the nobler and the more in number the persons 
are over whom it has power, the greater the 
wealth? Perhaps it may even appear, after some 
consideration, that the persons themselves are 
the wealth — that these pieces of gold with 
which we are in the habit of guiding them are, 
in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine 
harness or trappings, very glittering and beauti- 



THE VEINS OF WEALTH. 63 

ful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the 
creatures ; but that if these same living crea- 
tures could be guided without the fretting 
and jingUng of the Byzants in their mouths 
and ears, they might themselves be more valu- 
able than their bridles. In fact, it may be 
discovered that the true veins of wealth are 
purple, — and not in Rock, but in Flesh, — per- 
haps even that the final outcome and consumma- 
tion of all wealth is in the producing as many as 
possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy- 
hearted human creatures. Our modern wealth, 
I think, has rather a tendency the other way; 
— most political economists appearing to con- 
sider multitudes of human creatures not con- 
ducive to wealth, or at best conducive to it 
only by remaining in a dim-eyed and narrow- 
chested state of being. 

41. Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to 
serious question, which I leave to the reader's 
pondering, whether, among national manufact- 
ures, that of Souls of a good quality may not 



64 " UNTO THIS LAST." 

at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one ? 
Nay, in some far-away and yet undreamt-of 
hour, I can even imagine that England may 
cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to 
the barbaric nations among whom they first 
arose ; and that, while the sands of the Indus 
and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen 
the housings of the charger, and flush from 
the turban of the slave, she, as a Christian 
mother, mav at last attain to the virtues and 
the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able 
to lead forth her Sons, saying, 

" These are my Jewels." 



ESSAY III. 



QUI JUDICATIS TERRAM. 



42. Some centuries before the Christian era, 
a Jew merchant, largely engaged in business on 
the Gold Coast, and reported to have made one 
of the largest fortunes of his time (held also 
in repute for much practical sagacity), left 
among his ledgers some general maxims con- 
cerning wealth, which have been preserved, 
strangely enough, even to our own days. 
They were held in considerable respect by 
the most active traders of the middle ages, 
especially by the Venetians, who even went 
so far in their admiration as to place a statue 
of the old Jew on the angle of one of their 
principal public buildings. Of late years these 
writings have fallen into disrepute, being 
opposed in every particular to the spirit of 
modern commerce. Nevertheless I shall re- 

(65) 



66 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

produce a passage or two from them here, 
partly because they may interest the reader 
by their novelty, and chiefly because they 
will show him that it is possible for a very 
practical and acquisitive tradesman to hold, 
through a not unsuccessful career, that prin- 
ciple of distinction between well-gotten and 
ill-gotten wealth, which, partially insisted on 
in my last paper, it must be our work more 
completely to examine in this. 

43. He says, for instance, in one place : 
" The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is 
a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek 
death ; " adding in another, with the same 
meaning (he has a curious way of doubling 
his sayings), "Treasures of wickedness profit 
nothing : but justice delivers from death." 
Both these passages are notable for their 
assertions of death as the only real issue and 
sum of attainment by any unjust scheme of 
wealth. If we read, instead of ''lying tongue," 
"lying label, title, pretence, or advertisement," 



QUI JUDICATIS TEKRAM. 67 

we shall more clearly perceive the bearing 
of the words on modern business. The 
seeking of death is a grand expression of the 
true course of men's toil in such business. 
We usually speak as if death pursued us, 
and we fled from him ; but that is only so 
in rare instances. Ordinarily he masks him- 
self — makes himself beautiful — all glorious ; 
not like the King's daughter, all glorious 
within, but outwardly : his clothing of wrought 
gold. We pursue him frantically all our days, 
he flying or hiding from us. Our crowning 
success at three-score and ten is utterly and 
perfectly to seize, and hold him in his eternal 
integrity — robes, ashes, and sting. 

Again, the merchant says : " He that op- 
presseth the . poor to increase his riches, shall 
surely come to want." And again, more 
strongly : " Rob not the poor because he is 
poor ; neither oppress the afflicted in the place 
of business. For God shall spoil the soul of 
those that spoiled them." 



6S " UNTO THIS last:' 

This " robbing the poor because he is 
poor " is especially the mercantile form of 
theft, consisting in taking advantage of a 
man's necessities in order to obtain his 
labor or property at a reduced price. The 
ordinary highwayman's opposite form of 
robbery — of the rich, because he is rich — 
does not appear to occur so often to the 
old merchant's mind ; probably because, being 
less profitable and more dangerous than the 
robbery of the poor, it is rarely practised by 
persons of discretion. 

44. But the two most remarkable passages 
in their deep general significance are the follow- 
ing : 

'^ The rich and the poor have met. God is 
their maker." 

" The rich and the poor have met. God is 
their light." 

They " have met " : more literally, have 
stood in each other's way (^obviaverunf) , That 
is to say, as long as the world lasts, the action 



QUI yUDICATIS TEKRAM. 6g 

and counter-action of wealth and poverty, the 
meeting, face to fece,' of rich and poor, is 
just as appointed and necessary a law of that 
world as the flow of stream to sea, or the inter- 
change of power among the electric clouds : — 
" God is their maker." But, also, this action 
may be either gentle and just, or convulsive and 
destructive : it may be by rage of devour- 
ing flood, or by lapse of serviceable wave ; — 
in blackness of thunderstroke, or continual 
force of vital fire, soft, and shapeable into 
love-syllables from far away. And which of 
these it shall be, depends on both rich and 
poor knowing that God is their light; that 
in the mystery of human life, there is no 
other light than this by which they can see 
each other's faces, and live ; — Hght, which is 
called in another of the books among which 
the merchant's maxims have been preserved, 
the " sun of justice," ^ of which it is promised 

iMore accurately, Sun of Justness; but, instead of the 
harsh word "Justness," the old English "Righteousness" 
being commonly employed, has, by getting confused with 



70 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



that it shall rise at last with "healing " (health- 
/ giving or helping, making whole or setting at 
one) in its wings. For truly this healing is 
only possible by means of justice ; no love, 
f no faith, no hope will do it ; men will be un- 
wisely fond, vainly faithful, unless primarily 
they are just ; and the mistake of the best 
^ men through generation after generation, has 
been that great one of thinking to help the 
poor by almsgiving, and by preaching of 
patience or of hope, and by every other 
means, emollient or consolatory, except the 
one thing which God orders for them, justice. 

"godliness," or attracting about it various vague and broken 
meanings, prevented most persons from receiving the force of 
the passage in which it occurs. The word " righteousness " 
properly refers to the justice of rule, or right, as distinguished 
from " equity," which refers to the justice of balance. More 
broadly, Righteousness is King's justice ; and Equity Judge's 
justice; the King guiding or ruling all, the Judge dividing or 
discerning between opposites (therefore, the double question, 
" Man, who made me a ruler — ScKaarr/g — or a divider — 
fj,ept(jTf}g — over you ? " ) . Thus, with respect to the Justice of 
Choice (selection, the feebler and passive justice), we have 
from /e£-o, — lex, legal, loi, and loyal ; and with respect to the 
Justice of Rule (direction, the stronger and active justice), 
we have from re^o, — rex, regal, roi, and royal. 



QUI JUDICATIS TERRA M. 71 

But this justice, with its accompanying holi- 
ness or helpfulness, being even by the best 
man denied in its trial time, is by the mass 
of men hated wherever it appears : so that, 
when the choice was one day fairly put to 
them, they denied the Helpful One and the 
Just ; ^ and desired a murderer, sedition-raiser, 
and robber, to be granted to them ; — the 
murderer instead of the Lord of Life, the 
sedition-raiser instead of the Prince of Peace, 
and the robber instead of the Just Judge of all 
the world. 

45. I have just spoken of the flowing of 
streams to the sea as a partial image of the 
action of wealth. In one respect it is not a par- 
tial, but a perfect image. The popular econ- 
omist thinks himself wise in having discovered 
that wealth, or the forms of property in general, 
must go where they are required ; that where 
demand is, supply must follow. He farther 

i In another place written with the same meaning, "Just 
and having salvation." 



72 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



declares that this course of demand and supply 
cannot be forbidden by human laws. Precisely 
in the same sense, and with the same certainty, 
the waters of the world go where they are 
required. Where the land falls, the water 
flows. The course neither of clouds nor rivers 
can be forbidden by human will. But the 
disposition and administration of them can be 
altered by human forethought. Whether the 
stream shall be a curse or a blessing, depends 
upon man's labor, and administrating intelli- 
gence. For centuries after centuries, great 
districts of the world, rich in soil, and favored 
in climate, have lain desert under the rage of 
their own rivers; nor only desert, but plague- 
struck. The stream which, rightly directed, 
would have flowed in soft irrigation from field 
to field — would have purified the air, given 
food to man and beast, and carried their 
burdens for them on its bosom — now over- 
whelms the plain and poisons the wind; its 
breath pestilence, and its work famine. In 



QUI JUDICATIS TEKRAM. 73 

like manner this wealth "goes where it is 
required." No human laws can withstand its 
flow. They can only guide it : but this, the 
leading trench and limiting mound can do so 
thoroughly^ that it shall become water of life 
— the riches of the hand of wisdom ; ^ or, on 
the contrary, by leaving it to its own lawless 
flow, they may make it, what it has been 
too often, the last and deadliest of national 
plagues : water of Marah — the water which 
feeds the roots of all evil. 

The necessity of these laws of distribution 
or restraint is curiously overlooked in the 
ordinary political economist's definition of his 
own " science." He calls it, shortly, the 
" science of getting rich." But there are many 
sciences, as well as many arts, of getting rich. 
Poisoning people of large estates was one 
employed largely in the middle ages ; adul- 
teration of food of people of small estates 

' " Length of days in her right hand ; in her left, riches and 
honor." 



74 " UNTO THIS last:' 

is one employed largely now. The ancient 
and honorable Highland method of blackmail ; 
the more modern and less honorable system 
of obtaining goods on credit, and the other 
variously improved methods of appropriation — 
which, in major and minor scales of industry, 
down to the most artistic pocket-picking, we 
owe to recent genius, — all come under the 
general head of sciences, or arts, of getting 
rich. 

46. So that it is clear the popular economist, 

/ in calling his science the science par excellence 

of getting rich, must attach some peculiar ideas 

Vof limitation to its character. I hope I do not 
misrepresent him, by assuming that he means 
his science to be the science of "getting rich 
by legal or just means." In this definition, is 
the word "just," or "legal," finally to stand? 
For it is possible among certain nations, or 
under certain rulers, or by help of certain 
' advocates, that proceedings may be legal which 
/ are by no means just. If, therefore, we leave 



QUI JUDICATIS TERR AM. 75 

at last only the word " just " in that place of 
our definition, the insertion of this solitary and 
• small word will make a notable difference in 
the grammar of our science. For then it will 
follow that in order to grow rich scientifically, 
we must grow rich justly ; and, therefore, 
know what is just; so that our economy will 
no longer depend merely on prudence, but on 
jurisprudence — and that of divine, not human 
law. Which prudence is indeed of no mean 
order, holding itself, as it were, high in the 
air of heaven, and gazing for ever on the light 
of the sun of justice ; hence the souls which 
have excelled in it are represented by Dante 
as stars forming in heaven for ever the figure 
of the eye of an eagle ; they having been in 
life the discerners of light from darkness ; or 
to the whole human race, as the light of the 
body, which is the eye ; while those souls 
which form the wings of the bird (giving 
power and dominion to justice, " healing in its 
wings " ) trace also in light the inscription in 



76 " UNTO THIS last:' 

heaven : " diligite justitiam qui judicatis 
TERRAM." "Ye who judge the earth, give" 
(not, observe, merely love, but) " diligent love 
to justice " : the love which seeks diligently, 
that is to say, choosingly, and by preference to 
all things else. Which judging or doing judg- 
ment in the earth is, according to their capacity 
and position, required not of judges^ only> nor 
of rulers only, but of all men : ^ a truth 
sorrowfully lost sight of even by those who 
are ready enough to apply to themselves pas- 
sages in which Christian men are spoken of as 
called to be '^saints" {i.e., to helpful or healing 
functions) ; and '■'■ chosen to be kings " {i.e., to 

1 I hear that several of our lawyers have been greatly amused 
by the statement in the first of these papers that a lawyer's 
function was to do justice. I did not intend it for a jest; 
nevertheless, it will be seen that in the above passage neither 
the determination nor doing of justice are contemplated as 
functions wholly peculiar to the lawyer. Possibly, the more 
our standing armies, whether-of soldiers, pastors, or legislators 
(the generic term "pastor," including all teachers, and the 
generic term " lawyer," including makers as well as inter- 
preters of law) , can be superseded by the force of national 
heroism, wisdom, and honesty, the better it may be for the 
nation. 



QUI yUDICATIS TERR AM. 77 

knowing or directing functions) ; the true 
meaning of these titles having been long lost 
through the pretences of unhelpful and unable 
persons to saintly and kingly character; also 
through the once popular idea that both the 
sanctity and royalty are to consist in wearing 
long robes and high crowns, instead of in 
mercy and judgment ; whereas all true sanctity 
is saving power, as all true royalty is ruling 
power ; and injustice is part and parcel of the 
denial of such power, which " makes men as 
the creeping things, as the fishes of the sea, 
that have no ruler over them." ^ 

47. Absolute justice is indeed no more attain- 
able than absolute truth ; but the righteous 
man is distinguished from the unrighteous 
by his desire and hope of justice, as the true 
man from the false by his desire and hope of 
truth. And though absolute justice be un- 
attainable, as much justice as we need for all 

1 It being the privilege of the fishes, as it is of rats and 
wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply ; but the 
distinction of humanity to live by those of right. 



\ 



78 " c/jvTO THIS last:' 

practical use is attainable by all those who 
make it their aim. 

We have to examine, then, in the subject 
before us, what are the laws of justice respect- 
ing payment of labor — no small part, these, 
of the foundations of all jurisprudence. 

I reduced, in my last paper, the idea of 
money payment to its simplest or radical terms. 
In those terms its nature, and the conditions 
of justice respecting it, can be best ascer- 
tained. 

Money payment, as there stated, consists 
radically in a promise to some person working 
\ for us, that for the time and labor he spends 
I in our service to-day we will give or procure 
I equivalent time and labor in his service at 
; any future time when he may demand it.^ 

1 It might appear at first that the market price of labor 
expressed such an exchange : but this is a fallacy, for the 
market price is the momentary price of the kind of labor 
required, but the just price is its equivalent of the productive 
labor of mankind. This difference will be analyzed in its 
place. It must be noted also that I speak here only of the 
exchangeable value of labor, not of that of commodities. The 



QUI yUDICATIS TEKRAM. 



79 



If we promise to give him less labor than 
he has given us we' underpay him. If we 
promise to give him more labor than he 
has given us we overpay him. In practice, 
according to the laws of demand and supply, 
when two men are ready to do the work, and 
only one man wants to have it done, the two 
men underbid each other for it ; and the one 
who gets it to do is underpaid. But when 
two men want the work done, and there is 
only one man ready to do it, the two men 
who want it done overbid each other, and 
the workman is overpaid. 

48. I will examine these two points of injustice 
in succession ; but first I wish the reader to 
clearly understand the central principle, lying 
between the two, of right or just payment. 

When we ask a service of any man, ho 

exchangeable value of a commodity is that of the labor re 
quired to produce it, multiplied into the force of the demand 
for it. If the value 0/ the labor = x and the force of demand 
= y, the exchangeable value of the commodity is xy, in which 
if either x^=o, or j = o, xy = o. 



8o " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

may either give it us freely, or demand pay- 
ment for it. Respecting free gift of service, 
there is no question at present, that being a 
matter of affection — not of traffic. But if he 
demand payment for it, and we wish to treat 
him with absolute equity, it is evident that 
this equity can only consist in giving time 
for time, strength for strength, and skill for 
skill. If a man works an hour for us, and 
we only promise to work half an hour for 
him in return, we obtain an unjust advan- 
tage. If, on the contrary, we promise to 
work an hour and a half for him in return, 
he has an unjust advantage. The justice 
consists in absolute exchange ; or, if there 
be any respect to the stations of the parties, it 
will not be in favor of the employer : there is 
certainly no equitable reason in a man's being 
poor, that if he give me a pound of bread 
to-day, I should return him less than a pound 
of bread to-morrow j or any equitable reason 
in a man's being uneducated, that if he uses 



QUI yUDICATIS TERR AM. 8i 

a certain quantity of skill and knowledge in 
my service, 1 should use a less quantity of 
skill and knowledge in his. Perhaps, ulti- 
mately, it may appear desirable, or, to say 
the least, gracious, that 1 should give in return 
somewhat more than I received. But at pres- 
ent we are concerned on the law of justice 
only, which is that of perfect and accurate 
exchange ; — one circumstance only interfering 
with the simplicity of this radical idea of just 
payment — that inasmuch as labor (rightly 
directed) is fruitful just as seed is, the fruit 
(or " interest," as it is called) of the labor 
first given, or " advanced,'* ought to be taken 
into account, and balanced by an additional 
quantity of labor in the subsequent repay- 
ment. Supposing the repayment to take place 
at the end of the year, or of any other given 
time, this calculation could be approximately 
made, but as money (that is to say cash) 
payment involves no reference to time (it being 
optional with the person paid to spend what he 



82 " UNTO THIS last:' 

receives at once or after any number of years), 
we can only assume, generally, that some 
slight advantage must in equity be allowed to 
the person who advances the labor, so that 
the typical form of bargain will be : If you 
give me an hour to-day, I will give you an 
hour and five minutes on demand. If you 
give me a pound of bread to-day, I will give 
you seventeen ounces on demand, and so on. 
All that is necessary for the reader to note 
is, that the amount returned is at least in 
equity not to be less than the amount given. 

The abstract idea, then, of just or due wages, 
as respects the laborer, is that they will con- 
sist in a sum of money which will at any time 
procure for him at least as much labor as 
he has given, rather more than less. And 
this equity or justice of payment is, observe, 
wholly independent of any reference to the 
number of men who are willing to do the 
work. I want a horseshoe for my horse. 
Twenty smiths, or twenty thousand smiths, 



QUI JUDICATIS TERRA M. 83 

may be ready to forge it; their number does 
not in one atom's weight affect the question 
of the equitable payment of the one who does 
forge it. It costs him a quarter of an hour 
of his Hfe, and so much skill and strength of 
arm, to make that horseshoe for me. Then 
at some future time I am bound in equity to 
give a quarter of an hour, and some minutes 
more, of my life (or of some other person's 
at my disposal), and also as much strength 
of arm and skill, and a little more, in making 
or doing what the smith may have need of. 

49. Such being the abstract theory of just re- 
munerative payment, its application is practically 
modified by the fact that the order for labor 
given in payment is general, while the labor 
received is special. The current coin or docu- 
ment is practically an order on the nation for 
so much work of any kind ; and this universal 
applicability to immediate need renders it so 
much more valuable than special labor can be 
that an order for a less quantity of this general 



84 



''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



toil will always be accepted as a just equivalent 
for a greater quantity of special toil. Any 
given craftsman will always be willing to give 
an hour of his own work in order to receive 
command over half an hour, or even much less, 
of national work. This source of uncertainty, 
together with the difficulty of determining the 
monetary value of skill,^ render the ascertain- 

i Under the term " skill " I mean to include the united force 
of experience, intellect, and passion, in their operation on 
manual labor ; and under the term " passion," to include the 
entire range and agency of the moral feelings, — from the simple 
patience and gentleness of mind which will give continuity 
and fineness to the touch, or enable one person to work with- 
out fatigue, and with good effect, twice as long as another, up 
to the qualities of character which render science possible 
(the retardation of science by envy is one of the most tremen- 
dous losses in the economy of the present century) , and to 
the incommunicable emotion and imagination which are the 
first and mightiest sources of all value in art. 

It is highly singular that political economists should not yet 
have perceived, if not the moral, at least the passionate ele- 
ment, to be an inextricable quantity in every calculation. I 
cannot conceive, for instance, how it was possible that Mr. 
Mill should have followed the true clue so far as to write : 
" No limit can be set to the importance — even in a purely 
productive and material point of view — of mere thought," 
without seeing that it was logically necessary to add also, " and 
of mere feeling." And this the more, because in his first 
definition of labor he includes in the idea of it " all feelings 



QUI JUDICATIS TERR^AM. 85 

ment (even approximate) of the proper wages 
of any given labor in terms of a currency 
matter of considerable complexity. But tliey 
do not affect the principle of exchange. The 
worth of the work may not be easily known ; 
but it has a worth, just as fixed and real as the 
specific gravity of a substance, though such 
specific gravity may not be easily ascertainable 
when the substance is united with many others. 
Nor is there so much dif^culty or chance in 
determining it as in determining the ordinary 

of a disagreeable kind connected with the employment of one's 
thoughts in a particular occupation." True; but why not 
also "feelings of an agreeable kind" ? It can hardly be sup- 
posed that the feelings which retard labor are more essen- 
tially a part of the labor than those which accelerate it. The 
first are paid for as pain, the second as power. The workman 
is merely indemnified for the first ; but the second both produce 
a part of the exchangeable value of the work and materially 
increase its actual quantity. 

" Fritz is with us. He is worth fifty thousand men." Truly 
a large addition to the material force, — consisting, however, 
be it observed, not more in operations carried on in Fritz's 
head than in operations carried on in his armies' heart. " No 
limit can be set to the importance of mere thought." Perhaps 
not. Nay, suppose some day it should turn out that " mere " 
thought was in itself a recommendable object of production, 
and that all Material production was only a step towards this 
most precious Immaterial one ? 



86 *' UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

maxima and minima of vulgar political econ- 
omy. There are few bargains in which the 
buyer can ascertain with anything like pre- 
cision that the seller would have taken no 
less; or the seller acquire more than a com- 
fortable faith that the purchaser would have 
given no more. This impossibility of precise 
knowledge prevents neither from striving to 
attain the desired point of greatest vexation 
and injury to the other, nor from accepting it 
for a scientific principle that he is to buy for 
the least and sell for the most possible, though 
what the real least or most may be he cannot 
tell. In like manner, a just person lays it 
down for a scientific principle that he is to pay 
a just price, and, without being able precisely 
to ascertain the limits of such a price, will 
nevertheless strive to attain the closest possible 
approximation to them. A practically service- 
able approximation he can obtain. It is easier 
to determine scientifically what a man ought 
to have for his work than what his necessities 



QUI yUDICATIS TERR AM. 87 

will compel him to take for it. His necessities 
can only be ascertained by empirical, but his 
due by analytical investigation. In the one 
case you try your answer to the sum like a 
puzzled school-boy — till you find one that fits ; 
in the other you bring out your result, within 
certain limits, by process of calculation. 

50. Supposing, then, the just wages of any 
quantity of given labor to have been ascer- 
tained, let us examine the first results of just 
and unjust payment, when in favor of the 
purchaser or employer ; i.e., when two men 
are ready to do the work, and only one wants 
to have it done. 

The unjust purchaser forces the two to bid 
against each other till he has reduced their 
demand to its lowest terms. Let us assume 
that the lowest bidder offers to do the work 
at half its just price. 

The purchaser employs him, and does not 
employ the other. The first or apparent 
result is, therefore, that one of the two men is 



88 " UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

left out of employ, or to starvation, just as 
definitely as by the just procedure of giving 
fair price to the best workman. The various 
writers who endeavored to invalidate the 
positions of my first paper never saw this, 
and assumed that the unjust hirer employed 
both. He employs both no more than the just 
hirer. The only difference (in the outset) is 
that the just man pays sufficiently, the unjust 
man insufficiently, for the labor of the single 
person employed. 

I say, " in the outset," for this first or 
apparent difference is not the actual difference. 
By the unjust procedure half the proper price 
of the work is left in the hands of the 
employer. This enables him to hire another 
man at the same unjust rate, on some other 
kind of work ; and the final result is that he 
has two men working for him at half-price, 
and two are out of employ. 

51. By the just procedure the whole price of 
the first piece of work goes into the hands 



QUI yUDICATIS TEKRAM. 89 

of the man who does it. No surplus being 
left in the employef-'s hands, he cannot hire 
another man for another piece of labor. But 
by precisely so much as his power is diminished, 
the hired workman's power is increased; that 
is to say, by the additional half of the price 
he has received ; which additional half he has 
the power of using to employ another man in 
his service. I will suppose, for the moment, 
the least favorable, though quite probable, 
case that, though justly treated himself, he 
yet will act unjustly to his subordinate, 
and hire at half-price if he can. The final 
result will then be that one man works for 
the employer at just price ; one for the 
workman at half-price ; and two, as in the 
first case, are still out of employ. These 
two, as I said before, are out of employ 
in both cases. The difference between the 
just and unjust procedure does not lie in 
the number of men hired, but in the price 
paid to them, and the persotis by whom it 



go ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

is paid. The essential difference, that which 
I want the reader to see clearly, is that in 
the unjust case two men work for one, the 
first hirer. In the just case one man works 
for the first hirer, one for the person hired, and 
so on, down or up through the various grades 
of service, the influence being carried forward 
by justice and arrested by injustice. The 
universal and constant action of justice in this 
matter is therefore to diminish the power of 
wealth in the hands of one individual over 
masses of men, and to distribute it through a 
chain of men. The actual power exerted by 
the wealth is the same in both cases; but by 
injustice it is put all into one man's hands, 
so that he directs at once and with equal force 
the labor of a circle of men about him ; by 
the just procedure he is permitted to touch the 
nearest only, through whom, with diminished 
force, modified by new minds, the energy of 
the wealth passes on to others, and so till it 
exhausts itself. 



QUI yUDICATIS TEKRAM. ^x 

52. The immediate operation of justice in this 
respect is therefore to diminish the power of 
wealth, first, in acquisition of luxury, and 
secondly, in exercise of moral influence. The 
employer cannot concentrate so multitudinous 
labor on his own interests, nor can he subdue 
so multitudinous mind to his own will. But 
the secondary operation of justice is not less 
important. The insufficient payment of the 
group of men working for one jDlaces each 
under a maximum of difficulty in rising above 
his position. The tendency of the system is 
to check advancement. But the sufficient or 
just payment, distributed through a descending 
series of offices or grades of labor,^ gives each 

1 1 am sorry to lose time by answering, however curtly, the 
equivocations of the writers who sought to obscure the in- 
stances given of regulated labor in the first of these papers, by 
confusing kinds, ranks, and quantities of labor with its quali- 
ties. I never said that a colonel should have the same pay as 
a private, nor a bishop the same pay as a curate. Neither did 
I say that more work ought to be paid as less work (so that 
the curate of a parish of two thousand souls should have no 
more than the curate of a parish of five hundred) . But I said 
that, so far as you employ it at all, bad work should be paid 
no less than good work; as a bad clergyman yet takes his 



92 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

subordinated person fair and sufficient means 
of rising in the social scale, if he chooses to 
use them; and thus not only diminishes the 
immediate power of wealth, but removes the 
worst disabilities of poverty. 

53. It is on this vital problem that the entire 
destiny of the laborer is ultimately dependent. 
Many minor interests may sometimes appear 
to interfere with it, but all branch from it. For 
instance, considerable agitation is often caused 
in the minds of the lower classes when they 
discover the share which they nominally, and 

tithes, a bad physician takes his fee, and a bad lawyer his 
costs. And this, as will be farther shown in the conclusion, I 
said, and say, partly because the best work never was, nor 
ever will be, done for money at all ; but chiefly because the 
moment people know they have to pay the bad and good alike, 
they will try to discern the one from the other, and not use the 
bad. A sagacious writer in the " Scotsman " asks me if I should 
like any common scribbler to be paid by Messrs. Smith, Elder 
& Co. as their good authors are. I should, if they employed 
him — but would seriously recommend them, for the scribbler's 
sake as well as their own, not to employ him. The quantity 
of its money which the country at present invests in scribbling 
is not, in the outcome of it, economically spent ; and even the 
highly ingenious person to whom this question occurred 
might perhaps have been more beneficially employed than in 
printing it. 



QUI yUDICATIS TERR AM. 93 

to all appearance actually, pay out of their 
wages in taxation (I believe thirty-five or forty 
per cent.). This sounds very grievous; but in 
reality the laborer does not pay it, but his 
employer. If the workman had not to pay it, 
his wages would be less by just that sum ; 
competition would still reduce them to the 
lowest rate at which life was possible. 
Similarly the lower orders agitated for the 
repeal of the corn laws,^ thinking they would 

1 I have to acknowledge an interesting communication on 
the subject of free trade from Paisley (for a short letter from 

" A Well-wisher " at , my thanks are yet more due). But 

the Scottish writer will, I fear, be disagreeably surprised to 
hear that I am and always have been an utterly fearless and 
unscrupulous free-trader. Seven years ago, speaking of the 
various signs of infancy in the European mind C" Stones of 
Venice," Vol. iii., p. 168), I wrote: "The first principles of 
commerce were acknowledged by the English parliament only 
a few months ago, in its free-trade measures, and are still so 
httle understood by the million that no fiaiion dares to abolish 
its custojn-houses." 

It will be observed that I do not admit even the idea of 
reciprocity. Let other nations, if they like, keep their ports 
shut ; every wise nation will throw its own open. It is not the 
opening them, but a sudden, inconsiderate, and blunderingly 
experimental manner of opening them, which does harm. If 
you have been protecting a manufacture for a long series of 
years, you must not take the protection off in a moment, so as 



94 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

be better off if bread were cheaper ; never per- 
ceiving that as soon as bread was permanently 
cheaper, wages would permanently fall in pre- 
cisely that proportion. The corn laws were 
rightly repealed ; not, however, because they 
directly oppressed the poor, but because they 
indirectly oppressed them in causing a large 
quantity of their labor to be consumed un- 
to throw every one of its operatives at once out of employ, any 
more than you must take all its wrappings off a feeble child at 
once in cold weather, though the cumber of them may have 
been radically injuring its health. Little by little you must 
restore it to freedom and to air. 

Most people's minds are in curious confusion on the subject 
of free-trade, because they suppose it to imply enlarged com- 
petition. On the contrary, free-trade puts an end to all com- 
petition. " Protection " (among various other mischievous 
functions) endeavors to enable one country to compete with 
another in the production of an article at a disadvantage. 
When trade is entirely free, no country can be competed with 
in the articles for the production of which it is naturally cal- 
culated ; nor can it compete with any other in the production 
of articles for which it is not naturally calculated. Tuscany, 
for instance, cannot compete with England in steel, nor Eng- 
land with Tuscany in oil. They must exchange their steel 
and oil. Which exchange should be as frank and free as 
honesty and the sea- winds can make it. Competition, indeed 
arises at first, and sharply, in order to prove which is strongest 
in any given manufacture possible to both ; this point once 
ascertained, competition is at an end. 



QUI JUDICATIS TERR AM. 95 

productively. So also unnecessary taxation 
oppresses them, through destruction of capital; 
but the destiny of the poor depends primarily 
always on this one question of dueness of 
wages. Their distress (irrespectively of that 
caused by sloth, minor error, or crime) arises 
on the grand scale from the two reacting forces 
of competition and oppression. There is not 
yet, nor will yet for ages be, any real over- 
population in the world ; but a local over- 
population, or, more accurately, a degree ofj 
population locally unmanageable under exist- 
ing circumstances for want of forethought and 
sufficient machinery, necessarily shows itself 
by pressure of competition ; and the taking 
advantage of this competition by the purchaser 
to obtain their labor unjustly cheap, consum- 
mates at once their suffering and his own ; for 
in this (as I believe in every other kind of slav- 
ery) the oppressor suffers at last more than the 
oppressed, and those magnificent lines of Pope, 
even in all their force, fall short of the truth : 



^6 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

" Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf, 
Each does but HATE his neighbor as himself: 
Damned to the mines, an equal fate betides 
The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides." 

54. The collateral and reversionary operations 
of justice in this matter I shall examine here- 
after (it being needful first to define the nature 
of value) ; proceeding then to consider within 
what practical terms a juster system may be 
established; and ultimately the vexed question 
of the destinies of the unemployed workmen.^ 

^ I should be glad if the reader would first clear the ground 
for himself so far as to determine whether the difficulty lies 
in getting the work or getting the pay for it. Does he con- 
sider occupation itself to be an expensive luxury, difficult of 
attainment, of which too little is to be found in the world ? or 
is it rather that, while in the enjoyment even of the most ath- 
letic delight, men must nevertheless be maintained, and this 
maintenance is not always forthcoming ? We must be clear 
on this head before going farther, as most people are loosely 
in the habit of talking of the difficulty of " finding employ- 
ment." Is it employment that we want to find, or support 
during employment ? Is it idleness we wish to put an end to, 
or hunger ? We have to take up both questions in succession, 
only not both at the same time. No doubt that work is a lux- 
ury, and a very great one. It is, indeed, at once a luxury and 
a necessity ; no man can retain either health of mind or body 
without it. So profoundly do I feel this that, as will be seen 



QUI J U Die AT IS TERR AM. gy 

Lest, however, the reader should be alarmed at 
some of the issues to which our investigations 
seem to be tending, as if in their bearing 
against the power of wealth they had some- 
thing in common with those of socialism, I 
wish him to know, in accurate terms, one or 
two of the main points which I have in view. 
Whether socialism has made more progress 
among the army and navy (where payment 
is made on my principles), or among the 
manufacturing operatives (who are paid on 
my opponents' principles), I leave it to those 
opponents to ascertain and declare. Whatever 
their conclusion may be, I think it necessary 
to answer for myself only this : that if there 
be any one point insisted on throughout my 

in the sequel, one of the principal objects I would recommend 
to benevolent and practical persons is to induce rich people 
to seek for a larger quantity of this luxury than they at present 
possess. Nevertheless, it appears by experience that even 
this healthiest of pleasures may be indulged in to excess, and 
that human beings are just as liable to surfeit of labor as to 
surfeit of meat ; so that, as on the one hand, it may be char, 
itable to provide, for some people, lighter dinner and more 
work, for others it may be equally expedient to provide 
lighter work and more dinner. 



98 ''UNTO THIS LAST,'' 

X works more frequently than another, that one 
/ point is the impossibiUty of EquaUty. My 
/ continual aim has been to show the eternal 
superiority of some men to others, sometimes 
even of one man to all others ; and to show 
also the advisability of appointing such persons 
or person to guide, to lead, or on occasion 
even to compel and subdue, their inferiors 
according to their own better knowledge and 
wiser will. My principles of Political Economy 
were all involved in a single phrase spoken 
three years ago at Manchester : " Soldiers of 
the Ploughshare as well as Soldiers of the 
Sword;" and they were all summed in a 
single sentence in the last volume of " Modern 
Painters": "Government and cooperation are 
in all things the Laws of Life ; Anarchy and 
competition the Laws of Death." 

And with respect to the mode in which these 
general principles affect the secure possession 
of property, so far am I from invalidating such 
security, that the whole gist of these papers 



QUI yUDICATIS TERR AM. 99 

will be found ultimately to aim at an extension 
in its range ; and whereas it has long been 
known and declared that the poor have no 
right to the property of the rich, I wish it also 
to be known and declared that the rich have 
no right to the property of the poor. 

55. But that the working of the system which I 
have undertaken to develop would in many 
ways shorten the apparent and direct, though 
not the unseen and collateral, power, both of 
wealth, as the Lady of Pleasure, and of capital, 
as the Lord of Toil, I do not deny ; on the 
contrary, I affirm it in all joy fulness ; knowing 
that the attraction of riches is already too 
strong, as their authority is already too 
weighty, for the reason of mankind. I said 
in my last paper that nothing in history had 
ever been so disgraceful to human intellect 
as the acceptance among us of the common 
doctrines of political economy as a science. I 
have many groundr for saying this, but one 
of the chief may be given in few words. I 

L.ofC. 



lOO ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

know no previous instance in history of a 
nation's establishing a systematic disobedience 
to the first principles of its professed religion. 
The writings which we (verbally) esteem as 
divine, not only denounce ,-the love of money 
as the source^gf alL^ evil, and as an idolatry 
abhorred of the Deity, but declare mammon 
service to be the accurate and irreconcilable 
apposite of God's service ; and whenever they 
speak of riches absolute, and poverty absolute, 
declare woe to the rich, and blessing to the 
poor. Whereupon we forthwith investigate a 
science of becoming rich, as the shortest road 
to national prosperity. 

"Tai Cristian dannera I'Etiope, 
Quando si partiranno i due collegi, 

L'UNO IN ETERNO RICCO, E L'ALTRO INOPE." 



ESSAY IV. 



AD VALOREM. 



56. In the last paper we saw that just payment 
of labor consisted in a sum of money which 
would approximately obtain equivalent labor 
at a future time ; we have now to examine the 
means of obtaining such equivalence, — which 
question involves the definition of Value, 
Wealth, Price, and Produce. 

None of these terms are yet defined so as 
to be understood by the public. But the last, / 
Produce, which one might have thought the 
clearest of all, is, in use, the most ambiguous ; 
and the examination of the kind of ambiguity 
attendant on its present employment will best 
open the way to our work. 

In his chapter on Capita^ Mr. J. S. Mill 

* Book I., Chap, iv., s. I. To save space, my future references 
to Mr. Mill's work will be by numerals only, as in this instance, 
I. iv. I. Ed. in 2 vols., 8vo, Parker, 1848. 

(lOl) 



I02 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

instances, as a capitalist, a hardware manufact- 
urer, who, having intended to spend a certain 
portion of the proceeds of his business in buying 
plate and jewels, changes his mind, and '' pays 
it as wages to additional workpeople." The 
effect is stated by Mr. Mill to be that ^' more 
food is appropriated to the consumption of 
productive laborers." 

57. Now I do not ask, though, had I written 
this paragraph, it would surely have been 
asked of me. What is to become of the 
silversmiths? If they are truly unproductive 
persons, we will acquiesce in their extinction. 
And though in another part of the same pas- 
sage the hardware merchant is supposed also 
to dispense with a number of servants, whose 
"food is thus set free for productive purposes," 
I do not inquire what will be the effect, painful 
or otherwise, upon the servants, of this emanci- 
pation of their food. But I very seriously 
inquire why ironware is produce and silver- 
ware is not ? That the merchant consumes 



AD VALOREM. lO- 

the one and sells the other certainly does not 
constitute the difference,' unless it can be shown 
(which, indeed, I perceive it to be becoming 
daily more and more the aim of tradesmen to 
show) that commodities are made to be sold 
and not to be consumed. The merchant is an/ 
agent of conveyance to the consumer in one 
case, and is himself the consumer in the other ; ^ 
but the laborers are in either case equally 
productive, since they have produced goods to 
the same value, if the hardware and the plate 
are both goods. 

And what distinction separates them? It is 

^ If Mr. Mill had wished to show the difference in result be- 
tween consumption and sale, he should have represented the 
hardware merchant as consuming his own goods instead of 
selling them ; similarly, the silver merchant as consuming his 
own goods instead of selling them. Had he done this, he 
would have made his position clearer, though less tenable ; 
and perhaps this was the position he really intended to take, 
tacitly involving his theory, elsewhere stated, and shown in the 
sequel of this paper to be false, that demand for commodities 
is not demand for labor. But by the most diligent scrutiny of 
the paragraph now under examination I cannot determine 
whether it is a fallacy pure and simple, or the half of one fal- 
lacy supported by the whole of a greater one ; so that I treat 
it here on the kinder assumption that it is one fallacy only. 



I04 



" UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



I indeed possible that in the " comparative esti- 
mate of the moralist," with which Mr. Mill 
says political economy has nothing to do (III. 
i. 2), a steel fork might appear a more sub- 
stantial production than a silver one : we may 
grant also that knives, no less than forks, are 
good produce ; and scythes and ploughshares 
serviceable articles. But how of bayonets? 
Supposing the hardware merchant to effect 
large sales of these, by help of the " setting 
free " of the food of his servants and his 
silversmith, — is he still employing productive 
laborers, or, in Mr. Mill's words, laborers 
who increase " the stock of permanent means 
of enjoyment" (I. iii. 4)? Or if, instead of 
bayonets, he supply bombs, will not the abso- 
lute and final " enjoyment " of even these 
energetically productive articles (each of which 
costs ten pounds^) be dependent on a proper 
choice of time and place for their enfante- 
ment ; choice, that is to say, depending on 
^ I take Mr. Helps' estimate in his essay on War. 



AD VALOREM. 1 05 

those philosophical considerations with which 
political economy has nothing to do ? ^ 

58. I should have regretted the need of point- 
ing out inconsistency in any portion of Mr. Mill's 
work, had not the value of his work proceeded 
from its inconsistencies. He deserves honor 
among economists by inadvertently disclaiming 
the principles which he states, and tacitly in- 
troducing the moral considerations with which 
he declares his science has no connection. 
Many of his chapters are, therefore, true and 
valuable ; and the only conclusions of his 
which I have to dispute are those which 
follow from his premises. 

Thus the idea which lies at the root of the 
passage we have just been examining, namely, 

' Also, when the wrought-silver vases of Spain were dashed 
to fragments by our custom-house officers because bullion 
might be imported free of duty, but not brains, was the 
axe that broke them productive? the artist who wrought 
them unproductive? Or again. If the woodman's axe 
is productive, is the executioner's ? as also, if the hemp of 
a cable be productive, does not the productiveness of hemp 
in a haher depend on its moral more than on its material 
application? 



io6 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

that labor applied to produce luxuries will 
not support so many persons as labor applied 
to produce useful articles, is entirely true ; but 
the instance given fails — and in four directions 
of failure at once — because Mr. Mill has not 
defined the real meaning of usefulness. The 
definition which he has given — " capacity to 
satisfy a desire or serve a purpose" (III. i. 2) 
— applies equally to the iron and silver ; while 
the true definition — which he has not given, but 
which nevertheless underlies the false verbal 
definition in his mind, and comes out once or 
twice by accident (as in the words " any sup- 
port to life or strength" in I. i. 5) — applies 
to some articles of iron, but not to others, 
and to some articles of silver, but not to 
others. It applies to ploughs, but not to 
bayonets ; and to forks, but not to fihgree.^ 
59. The eliciting of the true definitions will 
give us the reply to our first question, " What is 

^ Filigree ; that is to say, generally, ornament dependent on 
complexity, not on art. 



AD VALOREM. 107 

value?" respecting which, however, we must 
first hear the popular statements. 

" The word * value,' when used without 
adjunct, always means, in political economy, 
value in exchange" (Mill, III. i. 3). So that 
if two ships cannot exchange their rudders, 
their rudders are, in politico-economic lan- 
guage, of no value to either. 

But " the subject of political economy is 
wealth." (Preliminary remarks, page i.) / 

And wealth " consists of all useful and 
agreeable objects which possess exchangeable 
value." (Preliminary remarks, page 10.) 

It appears, then, according to Mr. Mill, that 
usefulness and agreeableness underlie the 
exchange value, and must be ascertained to exist 
in the thing before we can esteem it an object 
of wealth. 

Now the economical usefulness of a thing 
depends not merely on its own nature, but 
on the number of people who can and will use it. 
A horse is useless, and therefore unsalable, if no 



lo8 ''UNTO THIS LAST." 

one can ride, a sword, if no one can strike, 
and meat, if no one can eat. Thus every 
material utility depends on its relative human 
capacity. 

Similarly, the agreeableness of a thing 
depends not merely on its own likeableness, 
but on the number of people who can be 
got to like it. The relative agreeableness, 
and therefore salableness, of " a pot of the 
smallest ale," and of " Adonis painted by 
a running brook," depends virtually on the 
opinion of Demos, in the shape of Christo- 
pher Sly. That is to say, the agreeableness 
of a thing depends on its relatively human 
disposition.^ Therefore political economy, 

1 These statements sound crude in their brevity, but will be 
found of the utmost importance when they are developed. 
Thus, in the above instance, economists have never perceived 
that disposition to buy is a wholly moral element in demand ; 
that is to say, when you give a man half a crown, it depends on 
his disposition whether he is rich or poor with it — whether he 
will buy disease, ruin, and hatred, or buy health, advancement, 
and domestic love. And thus the agreeableness or exchange 
value of every offered commodity depends on production, not 
merely of the commodity, but of buyers of it ; therefore on the 
education of buyers, and on all the moral elements by which 



AD VALOREM. 109 

being a science of wealth, must be a sci- 
ence respecting human capacities and dispo- 
sitions. But moral considerations have nothing 
to do with political economy (III. i. 2). 
Therefore moral considerations have nothing 
to do with human capacities and dispositions. 

60. I do not wholly like the look of this 
conclusion from Mr. Mill's statements — let 
us try Mr. Ricardo's : 

"Utility is not the measure of exchange- 
able value, though it is absolutely essential 
to it." (Chap. L, Sect, i.) Essential in what 
degree, Mr. Ricardo ? There may be greater 
and less degrees of utility. Meat, for instance, 
may be so good as to be fit for any one to 
eat, or so bad as to be fit for no one to eat. 

their disposition to buy this or that is formed. I will illustrate 
and expand into final consequences every one of these defini- 
tions in its place ; at present they can only be given with 
extremest brevity ; for in order to put the subject at once in a 
connected form before the reader I have thrown into one the 
opening definitions of four chapters ; namely, of that on Value 
("Ad Valorem"); on Price ("Thirty Pieces"); on Pro- 
duction ("Demeter"); and on Economy ("The Law of the 
House"). 



no ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

What is the exact degree of goodness which 
is " essential " to its exchangeable value, but 
not '^ the measure " of it ? How good must 
the meat be in order to possess any exchange- 
able value? and how bad must it be (I wish 
this were a settled question in London mar- 
kets) in order to possess none ? 

There appears to be some hitch, I think, 
in the working even of Mr. Ricardo's prin- 
ciples ; but let him take his own example. 
" Suppose that in the early stages of society 
the bows and arrows of the hunter were of 
equal value with the implements of the fisher- 
man. Under such circumstances the value of 
the deer, the produce of the hunter's day's 
labor, would be exactly " (italics mine) " equal 
to the value of the fish, the product of the 
fisherman's day's labor. The comparative 
value of the fish and game would be entirely 
regulated by the quantity of labor realized in 
each." (Ricardo, Chap, iii.. On Value.) 

Indeed ! Therefore, if the fisherman catches 



AD VALOREM. Ul 

one sprat, and the huntsman one deer, one 
sprat will be equal in value to one deer; but 
if the fisherman catches no sprat and the 
huntsman two deer, no sprat will be equal in 
value to two deer? 

Nay ; but — Mr. Ricardo's supporters may say 
— he means, on an average ; if the average 
product of a day's work of fisher and hunter 
be one fish and one deer, the one fish will 
always be equal in value to the one deer. 

Might I inquire the species of fish : whale ? 
or whitebait? ^ 

1 Perhaps it may be said, in farther support of Mr. Ricardo, 
that he meant, " when the utility is constant or given, the price 
varies as the quantity of labor." If he meant this, he should 
have said it ; but had he meant it, he could have hardly missed 
the necessary result, that utility v/ould be one measure of 
price (which he expressly denies it to be) ; and that, to prove 
salableness, he had to prove a given quantity of utility as 
well as a given quantity of labor ; to wit, in his own 
instance, that the deer and fish would each feed the same 
number of men for the same number of days, with equal 
pleasure to their palates. The fact is, he did not know 
what he meant himself. The general idea which he had 
derived from commercial experience, without being able to 
analyze it, was that when the demand is constant, the price 
varies as the quantity of labor required for production ; or, 
using the formula I gave in last paper, — when y is constant, 



112 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

It would be waste of time to pursue these fal- 
lacies farther ; we will seek for a true definition. 

6i. Much store has been set for centuries 
upon the use of our English classical education. 

X y varies as x. But demand never is nor can be ultimately 
constant, if x varies distinctly ; for as price rises, consumers 
fall away ; and as soon as there is a monopoly (and all scarcity 
is a form of monopoly, so that every commodity is affected 
occasionally by some color of monopoly) ,;/ becomes the most 
influential condition of the price. Thus the price of a painting 
depends less on its merit than on the interest taken in it by the 
public ; the price of singing less on the labor of the singer than 
the number of persons who desire to hear him ; and the price 
of gold less on the scarcity which affects it in common with 
cerium or iridium, than on the sunlight color and unalterable 
purity by which it attracts the admiration and answers the 
trust of mankind. 

It must be kept in mind, however, that i' use the word " de- 
mand " in a somewhat different sense from economists usually. 
They mean by it " the quantity of a thing sold." I mean by it 
'' the force of the buyer's capable intention to buy." In good 
English, a person's " demand " signifies, not what he gets, but 
what he asks for. 

Economists also do not notice that objects are not valued by 
absolute bulk or weight, but by such bulk and weight as is 
necessary to bring them into use. They say, for instance, that 
water bears no price in the market. It is true that a cupful 
does not, but a lake does ; just as a handful of dust does not 
but an acre does. And were it possible to make even the 
possession of a cupful or handful permanent {i.e., to find a 
place for them) , the earth and sea would be brought up by 
handfuls and cupfuls. 



AD VALOREM. 113 

It were to be wished that our well-educated 
merchants recalled to mind always this much 
of their Latin schooling — that the nominative 
of valorem (a word already sufficiently familiar 
to them) is valor; a word which, therefore, 
ought to be familiar to them. Valor ^ from 
valere, to be well or strong (vyiaivu), — 
strong, ifi life (if a man), or valiant; strong, 
for life (if a thing), or valuable. To be "valu- 
able," therefore, is to " avail towards life." A 
truly valuable or available thing is that which 
leads to life with its whole strength. In pro- 
portion as it does not lead to life, or as its 
strength is broken, it is less valuable ; in 
proportion as it leads away from life, it is 
unvaluable or malignant. 

The value of a thing, therefore, is inde- 
pendent of opinion and of quantity. Think 
what you will of it, gain how much you 
may of it, the value of the thing itself is 
neither greater nor less. For ever it avails, or 
avails not ; no estimate can raise, no disdain 



114 



« UNTO THIS last:' 



repress, the power which it holds from the 
Maker of things and of men. 

The real science of political economy, which 
has yet to be distinguished from the bastard 
science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astron- 
omy from astrology, is that which teaches 
nations to desire and labor for the things 
that lead to life ; and which teaches them to 
scorn and destroy the things that lead to 
destruction. And if, in a state of infancy, 
they supposed indifferent things, such as ex- 
crescences of shell-fish, and pieces of blue 
and red stone, to be valuable, and spent 
large measures of the labor which ought to 
be employed for the extension and ennobling 
of life, in diving or digging for them, and 
cutting them into various shapes, — or if, in 
the same state of infancy, they imagine pre- 
cious and beneficent things, such as air, light, 
and cleanliness, to be valueless, — or if, finally, 
they imagine the conditions of their own exist- 
ence, by which alone they can truly possess 



AD VALOREM. ue 

or use anything, such, for instance, as peace, 
trust, and love, to be prudently exchangeable, 
when the markets offer, for gold, iron, or 
excrescences of shells — the great and only 
science of Political Economy teaches them, in 
all these cases, what is vanity, and what sub- 
stance ; and how the service of Death, the 
Lord of Waste, and of eternal emptiness, 
differs from the service of Wisdom, the Lady 
of Saving, and of eternal fulness ; she who has 
said, " I will cause those that love me to inherit 
Substance; and I will Fill their treasures." 

The " Lady of Saving," in a profounder 
sense than that of the savings bank, though 
that is a good one : Madonna della Salute, — 
Lady of Health, — which, though commonly 
spoken of as if separate from wealth, is in- 
deed a part of wealth. This word "wealth," 
it will be remembered, is the next we have to 
define. 

62. "To be wealthy," says Mr. Mill, " is to | 
have a large stock of useful articles." \ 



Ii6 . "UNTO THIS last:' 

I accept this definition. Only let us per- 
fectly understand it. My opponents often 
lament my not giving them enough logic : I 
fear I must at present use a little more than 
they will like ; but this business of Political 
Economy is no light one, and we must allow 
no loose terms in it. 

We have, therefore, to ascertain in the 
above definition, first, what is the meaning of 
" having," or the nature of Possession. Then 
what is the meaning of "useful," or the nature 
of Utihty. 

And first of possession. At the crossing 
of the transepts of Milan Cathedral has lain, 
for three hundred years, the embalmed body of 
St. Carlo Borromeo. It holds a golden crosier, 
and has a cross of emeralds on its breast. 
Admitting the crosier and emeralds to be 
useful articles, is the body to be considered 
as "having" them? Do they, in the politico- 
economical sense of property, belong to it ? If 
not, and if we may, therefore, conclude gener- 



4 
AD VALOREM. 



117 



ally that a dead body cannot possess property, 
what degree and period of animation in the 
body will render possession possible? 

As thus : lately in a wreck of a Californian 
ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt 
about him with two hundred pounds of gold 
in it, with which he was found afterwards at 
the bottom. Now, as he was sinking, had 
he the gold? or had the gold him?^ 

And if, instead of sinking him in the sea 
by its weight, the gold had struck him on 
the forehead, and thereby caused incurable 
disease, — suppose palsy or insanity, — would 
the gold in that case have been more a 
"possession" than in the first? Without 
pressing the inquiry up through instances of 
gradually increasing vital power over the 
gold (which I will, however, give, if they 
are asked for), I presume the reader will see 
that possession, or " having," is not an abso- 

^ Compare GEORGE HERBERT, " The Church Porch,' 
Stanza 28. 



r. 



4k 

ii8 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

lute, but a gradated power; and consists not 
only in the quantity or nature of the thing 
possessed, but also (and in a greater degree) 
in its suitableness to the person possessing it 
and in his vital power to use it. 

And our definition of Wealth, expanded, 
becomes : " The possession of useful articles, 
which we can useT This is a very serious 
change. For wealth, instead of depending 
merely on a "have," is thus seen to depend 
on a "can." Gladiator's death, on a "habet; " 
but soldier's victory, and State's salvation, on a 
"quo plurimum posset." (Liv. VII. 6.) And 
what we reasoned of only as accumulation of 
material is seen to demand also accumulation 
of capacity. 

63. So much for our verb. Next for our 
adjective. What is the meaning of "useful"? 

The inquiry is closely connected with the last. 
For what is capable of use in the hands of 
some persons is capable, in the hands of others, 
of the opposite of use, called commonly " from- 



AD VALOREM. I19 

use," or " ab-use." And it depends on the 
person much more than on the article whether 
its usefuhiess or ab-usefulness will be the 
quality developed in it. Thus wine, which 
the Greeks, in their Bacchus, made rightly 
the type of all passion, and which, when used, 
" cheereth god and man" (that is to say, 
strengthens both the divine life, or reasoning 
power, and the earthy, or carnal power, of 
man) ; yet when abused becomes " Dionusos," 
hurtful especially to the divine part of man, 
or reason. And again, the body itself, being 
equally liable to use and to abuse, and when 
rightly disciplined serviceable to the State, 
both for war and labor; but when not dis- 
ciplined, or abused, valueless to the State, and 
capable only of continuing the private or single 
existence of the individual (and that but feebly) 
— the Greeks called such a body an "idiotic" 
or " private " body, from their word signifying 
a person employed in no way directly useful 
to the State, whence finally our " idiot," 



I20 ''UNTO THIS LAST." 

f\ meaning a person entirely occupied with his 
own concerns. 

Hence it follows that if a thing is to be 
useful, it must be not only of an availing 
nature, but in avaihng hands. Or, in accurate 
terms, usefulness is value in the hands of 
the valiant; so that this science of wealth 
being, as we have just seen, when regarded 
as the science of Accumulation, accumulative 
of capacity as well as of material, — when 
regarded as the Science of Distribution, is 
distribution not absolute, but discriminate ; 
not of every thing to every man, but of the 
right thing to the right man. A difficult 
science, dependent on more than arithmetic. 

64. Wealth, therefore, is " the possession of 

THE VALUABLE BY THE VALIANT ; " and in 

considering it as a power existing in a nation, 
the two elements, the value of the thing, and 
the valor of its possessor, must be estimated 
together. Whence it appears that many of 
the persons commonly considered wealthy 



AD VALOREM. I2i 

are in reality no more wealthy than the locks 
of their own strong boxes are, they being 
inherently and eternally incapable of wealth ; 
and operating for the nation in an economical 
point of view, either as pools of dead water, 
and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the 
stream flows, are useless, or serve only to 
drown people, but may become of importance 
in a state of stagnation should the stream 
dry) ; or else, as dams in a river, of which 
the ultimate service depends not on the dam, 
but the miller ; or else, as mere accidental 
stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, 
but (for we ought to have a correspondent 
term) as "illth," causing various devastation 
and trouble around them in all directions ; or 
lastly, act not at all, but are merely animated 
conditions of delay (no use being possible 
of anything they have until they are dead), in 
which last condition they are nevertheless 
often useful as delays, and " impedimenta," 
if a nation is apt to move too fast. 



122 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

65. This being so, the difficulty of the true 
science of PoHtical Economy lies not merely 
in the need of developing manly character to 
deal with material value, but in the fact, that 
while the manly character and material value 
only form wealth by their conjunction, they 
have nevertheless a mutually destructive 
operation on each other. For the manly 
character is apt to ignore, or even cast away, 
the material value ; whence that of Pope : 

" Sure, of qualities demanding praise 
More go to ruin fortunes, than to raise." 

And on the other hand, the material value is 
apt to undermine the manly character ; so that 
it must be our work, in the issue, to examine 
what evidence there is of the effect of wealth 
on the minds of its possessors ; also, what kind 
of person it is who usually sets himself to 
obtain wealth and succeeds in doing so ; and 
whether the world owes more gratitude to 
rich or to poor men, either for their moral 



AD VALOREM. l2-> 

influence upon it, or for chief goods, dis- 
coveries, and practical advancements. I may, 
however, anticipate future conclusions, so far as 
to state that in a community regulated only by 
laws of demand and supply, but protected from 
open violence, the persons who become rich 
are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, 
proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, 
unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The 
persons who remain poor are the entirely 
foolish, the entirely wise,' the idle, the reck- 
less, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the 
imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, 
the improvident, the irregularly and impul- 
sively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open 
thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly 
person. 

66. Thus far, then, of wealth. Next, we have 
to ascertain the nature of Price ; that is to say, 

' "6 Zetf 6r]T:ov rrevETai." — ' Arist. Plut.' 582. It would 
but weaken the grand words to lean on the preceding ones ; — 
** OTi Tov Yl'Aoi'Tov Tzapex^ fieAriova^ dv^pac;, kui ttjv yv6)fir]v, 
Kol T1JV tdeav,'* 



124 



" UNTO THIS LAST. 



of exchange value, and its expression by 
currencies. 

Note first, of exchange, there can be no 
profit in it. It is only in labor there can be 
profit — that is to say, a ''making in advance," 
or ''making in favor of" (from proficio). In 
exchange there is only advantage ; i.e., a bring- 
ing of vantage or power to the exchanging 
persons. Thus, one man by sowing and reap- 
ing turns one measure of corn into two meas- 
ures. That is profit. Another, by digging and 
forging, turns one spade into two spades. That 
is profit. But the man who has two measures 
of corn wants sometimes to dig; and the man 
who has two spades wants sometimes to eat : 
They exchange the gained grain for the gained 
tool, and both are the better for the exchange ; 
but though there is much advantage in the 
transaction there is no profit. Nothing is con- 
structed or produced. Only that which had 
been before constructed is given to the person 
by whom it can be used. If labor is neces- 



AD VALOREM. 125 

sary to effect the exchange, that labor is in 
reahty involved in the production, and, like all 
other labor, bears profit. Whatever number 
of men are concerned in the manufacture or in 
the conveyance, have share in the profit ; but 
neither the manufacture nor the conveyance 
are the exchange, and in the exchange itself 
there is no profit. 

There may, however, be acquisition, which 
is a very different thing. If in the exchange 
one man is able to give what cost him little 
labor for what has cost the other much he 
"acquires" a certain quantity of the produce 
of the other's labor. And precisely what 
he acquires the other loses. In mercantile 
language the person who thus acquires is 
commonly said to have " made a profit;" and 
I believe that many of our merchants are 
seriously under the impression that it is pos- 
sible for everybody, somehow, to make a profit 
in this manner. Whereas, by the unfortunate 
constitution of the world we live in, the laws 



126 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

both of matter and motion have quite rigor- 
ously forbidden universal acquisition of this 
kind. Profit or material gain is attainable 
only by construction or by discovery, not 
by exchange. Whenever material gain follows 
exchange, for every plus there is a precisely 
equal mintLs. 

Unhappily for the progress of the science of 
Political Economy, the plus quantities, or - — if I 
may be allowed to coin an awkward plural — 
the pluses, make a very positive and venerable 
appearance in the world, so that every one 
is eager to learn the science which produces 
results so magnificent ; whereas the minuses 
have on the other hand a tendency to retire 
into back streets, and other places of shade ; 
or even to get themselves wholly and finally 
put out of sight in graves ; which renders the 
algebra of this science peculiar, and difficultly 
legible ; a large number of its negative signs 
being written by the account-keeper in a kind 
of red ink, which starvation thins and makes 



AD VALOREM. 12', 

Strangely pale, or even quite invisible ink for the 
present. 

67. The Science of Exchange, or, as I hear it 
has been proposed to call it, of " Catallactics," 
considered as one of gain, is, therefore, simply 
nugatory ; but considered as one of acquisition, 
it is a very curious science, differing in its data 
and basis from every other science known. 
Thus : If I can exchange a needle with a 
savage for a diamond, my power of doing so 
depends either on the savage's ignorance of 
social arrangements in Europe, or on his want 
of power to take advantage of them, by selling 
the diamond to any one else for more needles. 
If, farther, I make the bargain as completely 
advantageous to myself as possible, by giving 
to the savage a needle with no eye in it 
(reaching thus a sufficiently satisfactory type 
of the perfect operation of catallactic science), 
the advantage to me in the entire transaction 
depends wholly upon the ignorance, powerless- 
ness, or heedlessness of the person dealt with. 



128 ''UNTO THIS LAST r 

Do away with these, and catallactic advantage 
becomes impossible. So far, therefore, as the 
science of exchange relates to the advantage 
of one of the exchanging persons only, it is 
fomided on the ignorance or incapacity of the 
opposite person. Where these vanish, it also 
vanishes. It is, therefore, a science founded on 
nescience, and an art founded on artlessness. 
But all other sciences and arts, except this, 
have for their object the doing away with 
their opposite nescience and artlessness. This 
science, alone of sciences, must, by all available 
means, promulgate and prolong its opposite 
nescience ; otherwise the science itself is impos- 
sible. It is, therefore, peculiarly and alone the 
science of darkness j probably a bastard science 
— not by any means a divina scientia, but one 
begotten of another father, that father who, 
advising his children to turn stones into bread, 
is himself employed in turning bread into 
stones, and who, if you ask a fish of him 



AD VALOREM. 129 

(fish not being producible on his estate), can 
but give you a serpent. 

68. The general law, then, respecting just or 
economical exchange, is simply this : There 
must be advantage on both sides (or if only 
advantage on one, at least no disadvantage 
on the other) to the persons exchanging ; and 
just payment for his time, intelligence, and 
labor to any intermediate person effecting 
the transaction (commonly called a merchant) ; 
and whatever advantage there is on either 
side, and whatever pay is given to the inter- 
mediate person, should be thoroughly known 
to all concerned. All attempt at concealment 
implies some practice of the opposite, or un- 
divine science, founded on nescience. Whence 
another saying of the Jew merchant's : " As 
a nail between the stone joints, so doth sin 
stick fast between buying and selling." Which 
peculiar riveting of stone and timber, in men's 
dealings with each other, is, again set forth in 
the house which was to be destroyed — timber 



I30 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



and stones together — when Zechariah's roll 
(more probably "curved sword") flew over it: 
*' the curse that goeth forth over all the earth 
upon every one that stealeth and holdeth him- 
self guiltless/' instantly followed by the vision 
of the Great Measure ; — the measure " of the 
injustice of them in all the earth " {avTT) 97 a'^i- 
Kia avTcov iv Trdarj rrj yy), with the weight of 
lead for its lid, and the woman, the spirit of 
wickedness, within it ; — that is to say, Wick- 
edness hidden by dulness, and formalized, out- 
wardly, into ponderously established cruelty. 
*' It shall be set upon its own base in the land of 
Babel." 1 

69. I have hitherto carefully restricted my- 
self, in speaking of exchange, to the use of the 
term " advantage ; " but that term includes two 
ideas : the advantage, namely, of getting what 
[we need, and that of getting what we wi'sk for. 
/ Three -fourths of the demands existing in the 
j world are romantic ; founded on visions, ideal- 
I ^ Zech. V. II. See note on the passage, at p. 148. 



AD VALOREM. 131 

isms, hopes, and affections ; and the regulation 
of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the 
imagination and the heart. Hence, the right 
discussion of the nature of price is a very high 
metaphysical and psychical problem ; some- 
times to be solved only in a passionate manner, 
as by David in his counting the price of the 
water of the well by the gate of Bethlehem ; 
but its first conditions are the following : The 
price of anything is the quantity of labor given 
by the person desiring it in order to obtain 
possession Of it. This price depends on four 
variable quantities : A. The quantity of wish 
the purchaser has for the thing; opposed to 
a, the quantity of wish the seller has to keep 
it. B. The quantity of labor the purchaser 
can afford to obtain the thing ; opposed to yS, 
the quantity of labor the seller can afford to 
keep it. These quantities are operative only in 
excess : i.e., the quantity of wish (^A) means 
the quantity of wish for this thing, above wish 
for other things ; and the quantity of work (^B) 



132 



" UNTO THIS LAST." 



means the quantity which can be spared to 
get this thing from the quantity needed to 
get other things. 

Phenomena of price, therefore, are intensely 
complex, curious, and interesting — too com- 
plex, however, to be examined yet ; every one 
of them, when traced far enough, showing itself 
at last as a part of the bargain of the Poor of 
the Flock (or "flock of slaughter"), "If ye 
think good give me my price, and if not, 
forbear" — Zech. xi. 12; but as the price of 
everything is to be calculated finally in labor, 
it is necessary to define the nature of that 
standard. 

70. Labor is the contest of the life of man 
with an opposite; — the term "life" including 
his intellect, soul, and physical power, contend- 
ing with question, difficulty, trial, or material 
force. 

Labor is of a higher or lower order, as it 
includes more or fewer of the elements of life ; 
and labor of good quahty, in any kind, in- 



AD VALOREM. 133 

eludes always as much intellect and feeling 
as will fully and harmoniously regulate the 
physical force. 

In speaking of the value and price of labor 
it is necessary always to understand labor of a 
given rank and quality, as we should speak of 
gold or silver of a given standard. Bad (that 
is, heartless, inexperienced, or senseless) labor 
cannot be valued ; it is like gold of uncertain 
alloy, or flawed iron.^ 

The quality and kind of labor being given, 
its value, like that of all other valuable things, 
is invariable. But the quantity of it which 

* Labor which is entirely good of its kind, that is to say, 
effective, or efficient, the Greeks called " weighable," or a^iog, 
translated usually " worthy," and because thus substantial and 
true, they called its price r^////, the "honorable estimate" of 
it {honorarium) : this word being founded on their concep- 
tion of true labor as a divine thing, to be honored with the 
kind of honor given to the gods ; whereas the price of false 
labor, or of that which led away from life, was to be, not 
honor, but vengeance ; for which they reserved another word, 
attributing the exaction of such price to a peculiar goddess 
called Tisiphone, the " requiter (or quittance-taker) of death ;"' 
a person versed in the highest branches of arithmetic, and 
punctual in her habits ; with whom accounts current have 
been opened also in modern days. 



134 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

must be given for other things is variable : and 
in estimating this variation, the price of other 
things must always be counted by the quantity 
of labor ; not the price of labor by the quantity 
of other things. 

71. Thus, if we want to plant an apple sap- 
ling in rocky ground it may take two hours' 
work ; in soft ground perhaps only half an hour. 
Grant the soil equally good for the tree in each 
case, then the value of the sapling planted by 
two hours' work is nowise greater than that of 
the sapling planted in half an hour. One will 
bear no more fruit than the other. Also, one 
half-hour of work is as valiiable as another half- 
hour ; nevertheless, the one sapling has cost 
four such pieces of work, the other only one. 
Now, the proper statement of this fact is, not 
that the labor on the hard ground is cheaper 
than on the soft, but that the tree is dearer. 
The exchange value may, or may not, after- 
wards depend on this fact. If other people 
have plenty of soft ground to plant in they will 



AD VALOREM. 



135 



take no cognizance of our two hours' labor in 
the price they will offer for the plant on the 
rock. And if, through want of sufficient bo- 
tanical science, we have planted an upas-tree 
instead of an apple the exchange value will 
be a negative quantity, still less proportion- 
ate to the labor expended. 

What is commonly called cheapness of 
labor signifies, therefore, in reality, that many 
obstacles have to be overcome by it ; so that 
much labor is required to produce a small re- 
sult. But this should never be spoken of as 
cheapness of labor, but as dearness of the 
object wrought for. It would be just as 
rational to say that walking was cheap because 
we had ten miles to walk home to our dinner, 
as that labor was cheap because we had to 
work ten hours to earn it. 

72. The last word which we have to define is 
" Production." 

I have hitherto spoken of all labor as profit- 
able ; because it is impossible to consider under 



136 " UNTO THIS last:' 

one head the quahty or value of labor, and 
its aim. But labor of the best quality may be 
various in aim. It may be either constructive 
(''gathering," from con and sti'uo), as agricul- 
ture; nugatory, as jewel-cutting; or destruc- 
tive ("scattering," from de and stnw), as 
war. It is not, however, always easy to prove 
labor, apparently nugatory, to be actually so ; ^ 
generally, the formula holds good : " he that 
gathereth not, scattereth ; " thus, the jeweller's 
art is probably very harmful in its ministering 
to a clumsy and inelegant pride. So that, 
finally, I believe nearly all labor may be 
shortly divided into positive and negative 

^The most accurately nugatory labor is, perhaps, that of 
which not enough is given to answer a purpose effectually, 
and which, therefore, has all to be done over again. Also, 
labor which fails of effect through non-cooperation. The 
cure of a little village near Bellinzona. to whom I had ex- 
pressed wonder that the peasants allowed the Ticino to flood 
their fields, told me that they would not join to build an 
effectual embankment high up in the valley, because every- 
body said " that would help his neighbors as much as him- 
self." So every proprietor built a bit of low embankment 
about his own field ; and the Ticino, as soon as it had a mind, 
swept away and swallowed all up together. 



AD VALOREM. 



137 



labor : positive, that which produces life ; 
negative, that which produces death ; the most 
directly negative labor being murder, and the / 
most directly positive, the bearing and rearing 
of children : so that in the precise degree in \ 
which murder is hateful, on the negative side 
of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing / 
is admirable, on the positive side of idleness. 
For which reason, and because of the honor 
that there is in rearing ^ children, while the 
wife is said to be as the vine (for cheering), the 
children are as the olive branch, for praise ; nor 
for praise only, but for peace (because large 
families can only be reared in times of peace), 
though since, in their spreading and voyaging 
in various directions, they distribute strength, 

^ Observe, I say, " rearing," not " begetting." The praise is 
in the seventh season not in aTroprjrdg, nor in (j>irra^ia, but in 
oTTtjpa. It is strange that men always praise enthusiastically 
any person who, by a momentary exertion, saves a life; but 
praise very hesitatingly a person who, by exertion and self- 
denial prolonged through years, creates one. We give the 
crown " od civem servatum" \ — why not " <?^ civein natum"7 
Born, I mean, to the full, in soul as well as body. England has 
oak enough, I think, for both chaplets. 



138 " UNTO THIS last:' 

they are, to the home strength, as arrows in 
the hand of the giant, — striking here and there 
far away. 

Labor being thus various in its result, the 
prosperity of any nation is in exact proportion 
to the quantity of labor which it spends in 
obtaining and employing means of life. Ob- 
serve, I say, obtaining and employing; that 
is to say, not merely wisely producing, but 
wisely distributing and consuming. Econo- 
mists usually speak as if there were no good 
in consumption absolute.^ So far from this 
being so, consumption absolute is the end, 
crown, and perfection of production; and wise 
consumption is a far more difficult art than 
wise production. Twenty people can gain 
money for one who can use it ; and the vital 
question, for individual and for nation, is 
never ^^how much do they make?" but, "to 
what purpose do they spend?" 

^ When Mr. Mill speaks of productive consumption, he only 
means consumption which results in increase of capital or 
material wealth. See I. iii. 4, and I. iii. 5. 



AD VALOREM. 13^^ 

73. The reader, may, perhaps, have been sur- 
prised at the slight reference I have hitherto 
made to '^capital," and its functions. It is 
here the place to define them. 

Capital signifies ^' head, or source, or root 
material" — it is material by which some deriv- 
ative or secondary good is produced. It is 
only capital proper {caput viviim, not caput 
mortuitnt) when it is thus producing something ' 
different from itself. It is a root which does 
not enter into vital function till it produces 
something else than a root, namely, fruit. 
That fruit will in time again produce roots ; / 
and so all living capital issues in reproduction / 
of capital ; but capital which produces nothing / 
but capital is only root producing root, bulb 
issuing in bulb, never in tulip, seed issuing in 
seed, never in bread. The Political Economy 
of Europe has hitherto devoted itself wholly to 
the multiplication, or (less even) the aggrega- 
tion, of bulbs. It never saw, nor conceived, 
such a thing as a tulip. Nay, boiled bulbs they 



I40 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



might have been, — glass bulbs, — Prince Rupert's 
drops, consummated in powder (well, if it were 
glass-powder and not gunpowder), for any end 
or meaning the economists had in defining the 
laws of aggregation. We will try and- get a 
clearer notion of them. 

The best and simplest general type of capi- 
tal is a well-made ploughshare. Now, if that 
ploughshare did nothing but beget other 
ploughshares, in a polypous manner, — how- 
ever the great cluster of polypous plough 
might glitter in the sun, — it would have lost its 
function of capital. It becomes true capital 
only by another kind of splendor, — when it 
is seen ^^ splendescere sulco,''^ to grow bright 
in the furrow ; rather with diminution of its 
substance, than addition, by the noble friction. 
And the true home question, to every capitalist 
and to every nation, is not, '^ how many ploughs 
have you?" but, "where are your furrows?" 
not — " how quickly will this capital reproduce 
itself ?" •^— but "what will it do during repro- 



AD VALOREM. 141 

duction?" What substance will it furnish, 
good for life? what work construct, protective 
of life? if none, its own reproduction is useless 
— if worse than none (for capital may destroy 
life as well as support it), its own reproduction 
is worse than useless ; it is merely an advance 
from Tisiphone, on mortgage, — not a profit by 
any means. 

74. Not a profit, as the ancients truly saw, and 
showed in the type of Ixion ; — for capital is 
the head, or fountain head, of wealth — the 
"well-head" of wealth, as the clouds are the 
well-heads of rain ; but when clouds are with- 
out water, and only beget clouds, they issue in 
wrath at last instead of rain, and in lightning 
instead of harvest ; whence Ixion is said first 
to have invited his guests to a banquet, and 
then made them fall into a pit filled with fire ; 
which is the type of the temptation of riches 
issuing in imprisoned torment, — torment in a 
pit (as also Demas' silver mine), after which, 
to show the rage of riches passing from lust of 



142 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



pleasure to lust of power, yet power not truly 
understood, Ixion is said to have desired Juno, 
and instead, embracing a cloud (or pKantasm), 
to have begotten the Centaurs ; the power of 
mere wealth being, in itself, as the embrace 
of a shadow, — comfortless (so also ^' Ephraim 
feedeth on wind and followeth after the east 
wind ; " or " that which is not " — Prov. xxiii. 5 ; 
and again Dante's Geryon, the type of ava- 
ricious fraud, as he flies, gathers the air up 
with retractile claws, — ^^Taer a se raccolse^^^), 

1 So also in the vision of the women bearing the ephah, be- 
fore quoted, "the wind was in their wings," not wings " of a 
stork," as in our version ; but " milvi," of a kite, in the Vul- 
gate, or perhaps more accurately still in the Septuagint, 
"hoopoe," a bird connected typically with the power of riches 
by many traditions, of which that of its petition for a crest of 
gold is perhaps the most interesting. The " Birds" of Aris- 
tophanes, in which its part is principal, are full of them ; note 
especially the " fortification of the air with baked bricks, like 
Babylon," i. 550; and, again, compare the Plutus of Dante, 
who (to show the influence of riches in destroying the i-eason) 
is the only one of the powers of the Inferno who cannot speak 
intelligibly, and also the cowardliest ; he is not merely quelled 
or restrained, but hterally " collapses " at a word ; the sudden 
and helpless operation of mercantile panic being all told in the 
brief metaphor, " as the sails, swollen with the wind, fall when 
the mast breaks." 



AD VALOREM. 143 

but in its offspring, a mingling of the brutal 
with the human nature ; human in sagacity, 
using both intellect and arrow; but brutal in 
its body and hoof, for consuming and trampling 
down. For which sin Ixion is at last bound 
upon a wheel, — fiery and toothed, and rolling 
perpetually in the air, — the type of human 
labor when selfish and fruitless (kept far into 
the Middle Ages in their wheel of fortune) ; 
the wheel which has in it no breath or spirit, 
but is whirled by chance only ; whereas of all 
true work the Ezekiel vision is true, that the 
Spirit of the living creature is in the wheels, 
and where the angels go, the wheels go by 
them ; but move not otherwise. . 

75. This being the real nature of capital, it 
follows that there are two kinds of true pro- 
duction, always going on in an active state : 
one of seed, and one of food ; or production 
for the Ground, and for the Mouth ; both of 
which are by covetous persons thought to be 
production only for the granary; whereas 



144 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



the function of the granary is but intermedi- 
ate and conservative, fulfilled in distribution ; 
else it ends in nothing but mildew, and 
nourishment of rats and worms. And since 
production for the Ground is only useful with 
future hope of harvest, all essential production 
is for the Mouth, and is finally measured by the 
mouth; hence, as I said above, consumption is 
the crown of production, and the wealth of a na- 
tion is only to be estimated by what it consumes. 
The want of any clear sight of this fact is 
the capital error, issuing in rich interest and 
revenue of error among the political econo- 
mists. Their minds are continually set on 
money-gain, not on mouth-gain; and they fall 
into every sort of net and snare, dazzled by 
the coin-glitter as birds by the fowler's glass ; 
or rather (for there is not much else like birds 
in them) they are like children trying to jump 
on the heads of their own shadows : the money- 
gain being only the shadow of the true gain, 
which is humanity. 



AD VALOREM. 



145 



76. The final object of political economy, there- 
fore, is to get good method of consumption, 
and. great quantity of consumption ; in other 
words, to use everything, and to use it nobly ; 
whether it be substance, service, or service 
perfecting substance. The most curious error 
in Mr. Mill's entire work (provided for him 
originally by Ricardo) is his endeavor to dis- 
tinguish between direct and indirect service, 
and consequent assertion that a demand for 
commodities is not demand for labor (I. v. 9, 
et seq.). He distinguishes between laborers 
employed to lay out pleasure grounds, and to 
manufacture velvet, declaring that it makes 
material difference to the laboring classes in 
which of these two ways a capitalist spends 
his money ; because the employment of the 
gardeners is a demand for labor, but the pur- 
chase of velvet is not.^ Error colossal, as well 

1 The value of raw material, which has, indeed, to be 
deducted from the price of the labor, is not contemplated in 
the passages referred to, Mr. Mill having fallen into the mis- 
take solely by pursuing the collateral results of the payment of 



146 " UNTO THIS last:' 

as strange. It will, indeed, make a difference 
to the laborer whether we bid him swing his 
scythe in the spring winds, or drive the loom 
in pestilential air ; but, so far as his pocket is 
concerned, it makes to him absolutely no dif- 
ference whether we order him to make green 
velvet, with seed and a scythe, or red velvet, 
with silk and scissors. Neither does it anywise 
concern him whether, when the velvet is made, 
we consume it by walking on it, or wearing it, 
so long as our consumption of it is wholly 
selfish. But if our consumption is to be in 

wages to middlemen. He says, "The consumer does not, 
with his own funds, pay the weaver for his day's work." Par- 
don me ; the consumer of the velvet pays the weaver with his 
own funds as much as he pays the gardener. He pays, prob- 
ably, an intermediate ship-owner, velvet merchant, and shop- 
man ; pays carriage money, shop rent, damage money, time 
money, and care money ; all these are above and beside the 
velvet price (just as the wages of a head gardener would be 
above the grass price) ; but the velvet is as much produced 
by the consumer's capital, though he does not pay for it till six 
months after production, as the grass is produced by his capi- 
tal, though he does not pay the man who rolled and mowed it 
on Monday till Saturday afternoon. I do not know if Mr. 
Mill's conclusion — "the capital cannot be dispensed with, 
the purchasers can" (p. 98), has yet been reduced to practice 
in the city on any large scale. 



AD VALOR EAT. 14 y 

any wise unselfish, not only our mode of con- 
suming the articles we require interests him, 
but also the kind of article we require with a 
view to consumption. As thus (returning for a 
moment to Mr. Mill's great hardware theory ^ ) : 
it matters, so far as the laborer's immediate 
profit is concerned, not an iron filing whether 
I employed him in growing a peach or forging 
a bombshell ; but my probable mode of con- 
sumption of those articles matters seriously. 
Admit that it is to be in both cases " unselfish," 
and the difference, to him, is final, whether, 
when his child is ill, I walk into his cottage 
and give it the peach, or "drop the shell down 
his chimney, and blow his roof off. 

The worst of it, for the peasant, is, that the 
capitalist's consumption of the peach is apt to 
be selfish, and of the shell, distributive ; " but 

1 Which, observe, is the precise opposite of the one under 
examination. The hardware theory required us to discharge 
our gardeners and engage manufacturers ; the velvet theory 
requires us to discharge our manufacturers and engage 
gardeners. 

2 It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in 



148 " UNTO THIS last:' 

in all cases, this is the broad and general fact, 
that on due catallactic commercial principles, 
somebody s roof must go off in fulfilment of 
the bomb's destiny. You may grow for your 
neighbor, at your liking, grapes or grape- 
shot; he will also, catallactically, grow grapes 
or grape-shot for you, and you will each reap 
what you have sown. 

Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports un- 
just wars. Just wars do not need so much money to support 
them ; for most of the men who wage such, v/age them gratis ; 
but for an unjust war men's bodies and souls have both to be 
bought, and the best tools of war for them besides ; which 
makes such war costly to the maximum ; not to speak of the 
cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which 
have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to 
buy an hour's peace of mind with : as, at present, France and 
England, purchasing of each other ten millions sterling worth 
of consternation annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns 
and half aspen leaves, — sown, reaped, and granaried by 
the *' science " of the modern political economist, teaching 
covetousness instead of truth) . And all unjust war being sup- 
portable, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans from 
capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of 
the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the 
capitalists' will being the primary root of the war; but its 
real root is the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it 
incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing about, 
therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment 
to each person. 



AD VALOREM. 



149 



77. It is, therefore, the manner and issue of 
consumption which are' the real tests of pro- 
duction. Production does not consist in things 
laboriously made, but in things serviceably 
consumable ; and the question for the nation 
is not how much labor it employs, but how 
much life it produces. For as consumption is 
the end and aim of production, so life is the 
end and aim of consumption. 

I left this question to the reader's thought two 
months ago (§§40-41), choosing rather that he 
should work it out for himself than have it 
sharply stated to him. But now, the ground 
being sufficiently broken (and the details into 
which the several questions, here opened, must 
lead us being too complex for discussion in the 
pages of a periodical, so that I must pursue 
them elsewhere), I desire, in closing the series 
of introductory papers, to leave this one great 
fact clearly stated. There is no Wealth but 
Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of 
joy, and of admiration. That country is the 



i5o 



« UNTO THIS .last:' 



richest which nourishes the greatest number of 
noble and happy human beings ; that man is 
richest who, having perfected the functions of 
his own hfe to the utmost, has also the widest 
helpful influence, both personal, and by means 
of his possessions, over the lives of others. 

A strange political economy ; the only one, 
nevertheless, that ever was or can be ; all 
political economy founded on self-interest ^ 
being but the fulfilment of that which once 
brought schism into the Policy of angels, and 
ruin into the Economy of Heaven. 

78. " The greatest number of human beings 
noble and happy." But is the nobleness 
consistent with the number? Yes, not only 
consistent with it, but essential to it. The 
maximum of life can only be reached by the 
maximum of virtue. In this respect the law 
of human population differs wholly from that 
of animal life. The multiplication of animals 

^ " In all reasoning about prices the proviso must be under- 
stood, ' supposing all parties to take care Of their own inter- 
est.'" — Mill, III. i. 5. 



AD VALOREM. I^I 

is checked only by want of food, and by the 
hostibty of races ; the population of the gnat 
is restrained by the hunger of the swallow, 
and that of the swallow by the scarcity of 
gnats. Man, considered as an animal, is indeed 
limited by the same laws : hunger, or plague, 
or war, are the necessary and only restraints 
upon his increase, — effectual restraints hitherto, 
— his principal study having been how most 
swiftly to destroy himself, or ravage his dwell- 
ing-places, and his highest skill directed to 
give range to the famine, seed to the plague, 
and sway to the sword. But, considered as 
other than an animal, his increase is not limited 
by these laws. It is limited only by the limits 
of his courage and his love. Both of these 
have their bounds, and ought to have ; his 
race has its bounds also ; but these have not 
yet been reached, nor will be reached for ages. 

79. In all the ranges of human thought I 
know none so melancholy as the speculations ot 
political economists on the population ques- 



152 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



tion. It is proposed to better the condition 
of the laborer by giving him higher wages. 
*' Nay," says the economist, '' if you raise his 
wages, he will either people down to the same 
point of misery at which you found him, or 
drink your wages away." He will. I know it. 
Who gave him this will? Suppose it were 
your own son of whom you spoke, declaring 
to me that you dared not take him into your 
firm, nor even give him his just laborer's 
wages, because if you did he would die of 
drunkenness, and leave half a score of children 
to the parish. " Who gave your son these 
dispositions?" I should inquire. Has he 
them by inheritance or by education? By one 
or other they must come ; and as in him, so 
also in the poor. Either these poor are of a 
race essentially different from ours, and un- 
redeemable (which, however often implied, I 
have heard none yet openly say), or else by such 
care as we have ourselves received, we may 
make them continent and sober as ourselves 



AD VALOREM. 



153 



— wise and dispassionate as we are — models 
arduous of imitation. " But," it is answered, 
"they cannot receive education." Why not? 
That is precisely the point at issue. Chari- 
table persons suppose the worst fault of the 
rich is to refuse the people meat ; and the 
people cry for their meat, kept back by fraud, 
to the Lord of Multitudes.^ Alas ! it is not 

* James v. 4. Observe in these statements I am not taking 
up nor countenancing one whit the common socialist idea 
of division of property : division of property is its destruction ; 
and with it the destruction of all hope, all industry, and all 
justice : it is simply chaos — a chaos towards which the be- 
lievers in modern political economy are fast tending, and from 
which I am striving to save them. The rich man does not 
keep back meat from the poor by retaining his riches, but by 
basely using them. Riches are a form of strength ; and a 
strong man does not injure others by keeping his strength, but 
by using it injuriously. The sociahst, seeing a strong man 
oppress a weak one, cries out : " Break the strong man's 
arms ; " but I say, '* Teach him to use them to better pur- 
pose." The fortitude and intelligence which acquire riches are 
intended, by the Giver of both, not to scatter, nor to give away, 
but to employ those riches in the service of mankind ; in other 
words, in the redemption of the erring and aid of the weak, — 
that is to say, there is first to be the work to gain money ; then 
the Sabbath of use for it —the Sabbath, whose law is, not to 
lose life, but to save. It is continually the fault or the folly of 
the poor that they are poor, as it is usually a child's fault if it 
falls into a pond, and a cripple's weakness that slips at a cross- 



154 



''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 



meat of which the refusal is crudest, or to 
which the claim is validest. The life is more 
than the meat. The rich not only refuse 
food to the poor : they refuse wisdom ; they 
refuse virtue ; they refuse salvation. Ye sheep 
without shepherd, it is not the pasture that 
has been shut from you, but the Presence. 
Meat ! perhaps your right to that may be plead- 
able ; but other rights have to be pleaded first. 
Claim your crumbs from the table if you will ; 
but claim them as children, not as dogs; 
claim your right to be fed, but claim more 
loudly your right to be holy, perfect, and 
pure. 

Strange words to be used of working people ! 
" What ! holy ; without any long robes or 
anointing oils ; these rough-jacketed, rough- 
ing ; nevertheless, most passers-by would pull the child out, or 
help up the cripple. Put it at the worst, that all the poor of 
the world are but disobedient children, or careless cripples, 
and that all rich people are wise and strong, and you will see 
at once that neither is the socialist right in desiring to make 
everybody poor, powerless, and foolish as he is himself, nor the 
rich man right in leaving the children in the mire. 



AD VALOREM. 



155 



worded persons ; set to nameless, dishonored 
service? Perfect! — these, with dim eyes and 
cramped limbs, and slowly wakening minds? 
Pure ! — these, with sensual desire and grovel- 
ling thought; foul of body and coarse of soul?" 
It may be so ; nevertheless, such as they are, 
they are the holiest, perfectest, purest persons 
the earth can at present show. They may be 
what you have said ; but if so, they yet are 
holier than we who have left them thus. 

But what can be done for them? Who can 
clothe — who teach — who restrain their multi- 
tudes? What end can there be for them at 
last, but to consume one another? 

I hope for another end, though not, indeed, 
from any of the three remedies for over-popu- 
lation commonly suggested by economists. 

80. These three are, in brief. Colonization; 
Bringing in of waste lands ; or Discouragement 
of marriage. 

The first and second of these expedients 
merely evade or delay the question. It will, 



156 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

indeed, be long before the world has been all 
colonized, and its deserts all brought under 
cultivation. But the radical question is, not 
how much habitable land is in the world, but 
how many human beings ought to be main- 
tained on a given space of habitable land. 

Observe, I say, ought to be, not how many 
can be. Ricardo, with his usual inaccuracy, de- 
fines what he calls the "natural rate of wages " 
as "that which will maintain the laborer." 
Maintain him ! yes ; but how ? — the question 
was instantly thus asked of me by a working 
girl, to whom I read the passage. I will 
amplify her question for her. " Maintain him, 
how?" As, first, to what length of life? Out 
of a given number of fed persons, how many 
are to be old — how many young? that is to 
say, will you arrange their maintenance so as 
to kill them early — say at thirty or thirty-five 
on the average, including deaths of weakly or 
ill-fed children ? — or so as to enable them to 
live out a natural life ? You will feed a greater 



AD VALOREM. 157 

number, in the first case/ by rapidity of suc- 
cession ; probably a happier number in the sec- 
ond : which does Mr. Ricardo mean to be 
their natural state, and to which state belongs 
the natural rate of wages? 

Again : A piece of land which will only 
support ten idle, ignorant, and improvident 
persons will support thirty or forty intelligent 
and industrious ones. Which of these is their 
natural state, and to which of them belongs 
the natural rate of wages? 

Again : If a piece of land support forty per- 
sons in industrious ignorance ; and if, tired of 
this ignorance, they set apart ten of their num- 
ber to study the properties of cones, and the 
sizes of stars ; the labor of these ten being 
withdrawn from the ground must either tend 
to the increase of food in some transitional 
manner, or the persons set apart for sidereal 
and conic purposes must starve, or some one 

^ The quantity of life is the same in both cases ; but it is dif- 
ferently allotted. 



158 ''UNTO THIS LAST,'' 

else starve instead of them. What is, there- 
fore, the natural rate of wages of the scientific 
persons, and how does this rate relate to, or 
measure, their reverted or transitional produc- 
tiveness ? 

Again : If the ground maintains, at first, 
forty laborers in a peaceable and pious state 
of mind, but they become in a few years so 
quarrelsome and impious that they have to set 
apart five to meditate upon and settle their 
disputes; ten, armed to the teeth with costly 
instruments, to enforce the decisions ; and five 
to remind everybody in an eloquent manner of 
the existence of a God ? — what will be the 
result upon the general power of production, 
and what is the "natural rate of wages" of the 
meditative, muscular, and oracular laborers? 

81. Leaving these questions to be discussed 
or waived, at their pleasure, by Mr. Ricardo's 
followers, I proceed to state the main facts 
bearing on that probable future of the laboring 
classes which has been partially glanced at by 



AD VALOREM. 



159 



Mr. Mill. That chapter and the preceding one 
differ from the common Writing of political econ- 
omists in admitting some value in the aspect 
of nature, and expressing regret at the proba- 
bility of the destruction of natural scenery. 
But we may spare our anxieties on this head. 
Men can neither drink steam nor eat stone. 
The maximum of population on a given space 
of land implies also the relative maximum of 
edible vegetable, whether for men or cattle ; it 
implies a maximum of pure air and of pure 
water. Therefore, a maximum of wood, to 
transmute the air, and of sloping ground, pro- 
tected by herbage from the extreme heat of the 
sun, to feed the streams. All England may, if 
it so chooses, become one manufacturing town ; 
and Englishmen, sacrificing themselves to the 
good of general humanity, may live diminished 
lives in the midst of noise, of darkness, and 
of deadly exhalation. But the world cannot 
become a factory nor a mine. No amount of 
ingenuity will ever make iron digestible by 



i6o " UNTO THIS last:' 

the million, nor substitute hydrogen for wine. 
Neither the avarice nor the rage of men will 
ever feed them ; and however the apple of 
Sodom and the grape of Gomorrah may 
spread their table for a time with dainties of 
ashes, and nectar of asps, — so long as men live 
by bread, the far-away valleys must laugh as 
they are covered with the gold of God, and 
the shouts of his happy multitudes ring round 
the wine press and the well. 

82. Nor need our more sentimental econo- 
mists fear the too wide spread of the formalities 
of a mechanical agriculture. The presence of a 
wise population implies the search for felicity as 
well as for food ; nor can any population reach 
its maximum but through that wisdom which 
" rejoices " in the habitable parts of the earth. 
The desert has its appointed place and work ; 
the eternal engine, whose beam is the earth's 
axle, whose beat is its year, and whose breath is 
its ocean, will still divide imperiously to their 
desert kingdoms bound with unfurrowable rock, 



AD VALOREM, i6i 

and swept by unarrested sand, their powers of 
frost and fire ; but the zones and lands between, 
habitable, will be loveliest in habitation. The 
desire of the heart is also the light of the eyes. 
No scene is continually and untiringly loved, 
but one rich by joyful human labor; smooth 
in field ; fair in garden ; full in orchard ; trim, 
sweet, and frequent in homestead ; ringing with 
voices of vivid existence. No air is sweet that 
is silent; it is only sweet when full of low 
currents of undersound — triplets of birds, and 
murmur and chirp of insects, and deep-toned 
words of men, and wayward trebles of child- 
hood. As the art of life is learned, it will be 
found at last that all lovely things are also 
necessary, — the wild flower by the wayside, as 
well as the tended corn ; and the wild birds and 
creatures of the forest, as well as the tended 
cattle ; because man doth not live by bread 
only, but also by the desert manna, by every 
wondrous word and unknowable work of God. 
Happy in that he knew them not, nor did 



1 62 " UNTO THIS last:' 

his fathers know, and that round about him 
reaches yet into the infinite the amazement 
of his existence. 

^2)' Note, finally, that all effectual advance- 
ment towards this true felicity of the human 
race must be by individual, not public effort. 
Certain general measures may aid, certain re- 
vised laws guide, such advancement; but the 
measure and law which have first to be deter- 
mined are those of each man's home. We con- 
tinually hear it recommended by sagacious people 
to complaining neighbors (usually less well 
placed in the world than themselves) that they 
should " remain content in the station in which 
Providence has placed them." There are per- 
haps some circumstances of life in which Provi- 
dence has no intention that people should be 
content. Nevertheless, the maxim is on the 
whole a good one ; but it is peculiarly for home 
use. That your neighbor should or should not 
remain content with his position is not your 
business; but it is very much your business to 



AD VALOREM. 



163 



remain content with your own. What is chiefly 
needed in England at the present day is to 
show the quantity of pleasure that may be ob- 
tained by a consistent, well-administered com- 
petence, modest, confessed, and laborious. We 
need examples of people who, leaving Heaven 
to decide whether they are to rise in the 
world, decide for themselves that they will be 
happy in it, and have resolved to seek — not 
greater wealth, but simpler pleasure ; not higher 
fortune, but deeper felicity ; making the first 
of possessions, self-possession ; and honoring 
themselves in the harmless pride and calm 
pursuits of peace. 

Of which lowly peace it is written that 
" justice and peace have kissed each other ; " 
and that the fruit of justice is " sown in peace 
of them that make peace ; " not " peacemakers " 
in the common understanding — reconcilers of 
quarrels (though that function also follows on 
the greater one ) — but peace-Creators, Givers of 
Calm. Which you cannot give unless you first 



1 64 " UNTO THIS last:' 

gain; nor is this gain one which will follow 
assuredly on any course of business, commonly 
so called. No form of gain is less probable, 
business being (as is shown in the language of 
all nations — ircoXelv from TreXo), TrpaaL^ from 
irepdco.f venire, vendre, and venal, from venio, 
etc.) essentially restless — and probably con- 
tentious — having a raven-like mind to the 
motion to and fro, as to the carrion food ; 
whereas the olive feeding and bearing birds 
look for rest for their feet. Thus it is said of 
Wisdom that she ^' hath builded her house, 
and hewn out her seven pillars;" and even 
when, though apt to wait long at the door- 
posts, she has to leave her house and go 
abroad, her paths are peace also. 

84. For us, at all events, her work must 
begin at the entry of the doors; all true 
economy is " Law of the house." Strive to 
make that law strict, simple, generous ; waste 
nothing, and grudge nothing. Care in no 
wise to make more of money, but care to 



AD VALOREM. 



165 



make much of it ; remembering always the 
great, palpable, inevitalDle fact — the rule and 
root of all economy — that what one person 
has another cannot have ; and that every atom 
of substance, of whatever kind, used or con- 
sumed, is so much human life spent ; which, 
if it issue in the saving present life, or gain- 
ing more, is well spent, but if not is either so 
much life prevented or so much slain. In all 
buying consider first what condition of exist- 
ence you cause in the producers of what you 
buy ; secondly, whether the sum you have paid 
is just to the producer, and in due propor- 
tion lodged in his hands ; ^ thirdly, to how 
much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, 

^ The proper offices of middlemen, namely, overseers (or 
authoritative workmen), conveyancers (merchants, sailors, 
retail dealers, etc.), and order-takers (persons employed to 
receive directions from the consumer), must, of course, be 
examined before I can enter farther into the question of just 
payment of the first producer. But I have not spoken of them 
in these introductory papers, because the evils attendant on 
the abuse of such intermediate functions result not from any 
alleged principle of modern political economy, but from private 
carelessness or iniquity. 



i66 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

this that you have bought can be put ; and 
fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be 
most speedily and serviceably distributed ; in 
all dealings whatsoever insisting on entire open- 
ness and stern fulfilment; and in all doings, 
on perfection and loveliness of accomplish- 
ment ; especially on fineness and purity of all 
marketable commodity, watching at the same 
time for all ways of gaining or teaching powers 
of simple pleasure ; and of showing " oaov iv 
aa(f)oSe\q) yey oveiap " — the sum of enjoy- 
ment depending not on the quantity of things 
tasted, but on the vivacity and patience of 
taste. 

85. And if, on due and honest thought over 
these things, it seems that the kind of exist- 
ence to which men are now summoned by 
every plea of pity and claim of right, may, 
for some time at least, not be a luxurious one, 
consider whether, even supposing it guiltless, 
luxury would be desired by any of us if we 
saw clearly at our sides the suffering which 



AD VALOREM. 167 

accompanies it in the world. Luxury is indeed 
possible in the future, innocent and exquisite ; 
luxury for all and by the help of all; but 
luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the 
ignorant; the crudest man living could not 
sit at his feast unless he sat blindfold. Raise 
the veil boldly ; face the light ; and if, as 
yet, the light of the eye can only be through 
tears and the light of the body through sack- 
cloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious 
seed, until the time come, and the kingdom, 
when Christ's gift of bread and bequest of 
peace shall be " Unto this last as unto thee ; " 
and when, for earth's severed multitudes of 
the wicked and the weary there shall be holier 
reconciliation than that of the narrow home, 
and calm economy where the Wicked cease 
— not from trouble, but from troubling — and 
the Weary are at rest. 



INDEX. 



INDEX 



Abuse, use and, 119. 

Accumulation of capacity, not only of material, 120. 

" of material for its own sake ends in rotten- 

ness, 144. 
Acquisition, profit distinct from, 125. 
Adonis, " painted by a running brook," 108. 

" value of such a picture, 108. 

Adulteration, 33. 

" the least, to be avoided, 166. 

Advantage, meaning of the word, 130. 
Advertisement, lying, 66. 
Affection, avarice or, which most constant in man, 2. 

" is a debt owed by one to another, and is thus part of 

justice, 8. 
" motives of, as influencing, e.g., domestic servants, 
Zseqq. 
Agreeableness, relativity of, 108. 

Agriculture, serving one's country with the spade, /r^ xix. 
Alchemy, i. 

Ale, " a pot of the smallest," 108. 
Almsgiving, justice before, 70. 
Anarchy, a law of death, 98. 
Antagonism, opposite interest need not cause — e.g.^ starving 

mother and her children, 5. 
Aristophanes, " Birds " (i-5So), on the hoopoe, I42«. 
Aristotle, Plutus (582), 6 Sfrr . . . rjherai, 123^. 
Armies, standing, cost of, I47«. 
Art, imagination and, 84«. 



172 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

Astrology, i. 

114. 
Astronomy, must define a star? pref. xii. 

61, 114. 
Author, writingfs of, 

10 May, 1862, at Denmark Y{.\}\,pref. xx. 
18 March, 1877, at Venice, pref. xiv«. 
{a) accused of being illogical, 116. 

plans for further works on economy, 149 
style of, not intemperate, pref. -sXvn. 
{h) quoted, etc. 

A Joy for Ever (" Polit. Economy of Art"), 
" soldiers of ploughshare and of sword," pref. 
xix., 98. 
"Modern Painters," vol. v., on anarchy and 
government, 98. 
{c) " Sesame and Lilies," s. 18, on author's style, 
pref. xiv«. 
" Stones of Venice," iii. 168, on free trade, 93«. 
" Unto this Last " : 

adverse reception of, pref. ix. 
/ author's high estimate of, pref ix-x. 

gist of, pref -Ksegq. 

publication in the " Cornhill," pref. ix. 
titles of proposed further chapters, io8«. 
Authorship, bad, no money to be wasted on, 92?^. 
Autolycus, 29. 
Avarice, affection or, most constant in men ? 2. 

fraud and, Geryon typical of, 142. 
Axe, executioner's and woodman's, are both productive, lo^n. 
a^iog, meaning of, 133/2. 
Axle, the earth's, 160. 

Bacchus, Dionusos and, 119. 

Banks, savings-, 115. 

Barabbas, chosen before Christ, 71. 



INDEX. 



173 



Bayonets, are they produce ? 104, 106. 

Beasts, supply and demand their law, but right the law of man, 

77«. 
Bellinzona, floods near (anecdote), I36«. 
Bible, on the poor and rich, 100. 

" popular acceptance and disregard of the, 100. 

" quoted and referred to : 

Genesis viii. 9, " No rest for . . . her foot," 164. 
Exodus XV. 23, *' Waters of Marah," 73. 
Numbers xxvii. 17, " Sheep which have no shepherd," 154. 
Judges ix. 13, " Wine which cheereth God and Man," 119. 
Job iii. 17, "Wicked cease from troiiblin^" . . . 167. 
Ps. xlv. 14, " The King's daughters . . . glorious within," 67. 
" Ixxxv. 13, " Righteousness and peace have kissed each 

other," 163. 
'* cxxviii, 3, " Thy wife as a vine . . . thy children as olive 
plants," 137. 
Prov. iii. 16, •' Length of days . . . riches and honour," 73«. 
" 17, " Her ways pleasantness . . . paths peace," 164. 

'• viii. 21, " Those that love me . . . inherit substance . . . 

fill their treasures," 115. 
" 31, " Rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth," 

160. 
" ix. I, " Wisdom builded her house . . . seven pillars," 

164. 
*' X. 2, " Treasures of wickedness profit nothing," 66. 
'* xxi. 6, " Getting of treasures by a lying tongue," 66. 
" xxii. 2, •' The rich and the poor meet," 68. 
" 16, •' He that oppresseth the poor • . . shall come to 

want," 67. 
" 22, " Rob not the poor "... 67. 

" xxiii. 5, " Wilt thou set eyes on that which is not? for 
riches make themselves wings," 142. 
Hoseaxii. i,"Ephraim feedeth on wind," 142. 
Habakkuk i. 14, " Fishes and creeping things that have no 

ruler over them," 77. 
Zechariah v. i, Zechariah's " flying roll," 130. 

" 3, " The curse . . . for every one that stealeth " 

(marginal version), 130. 



174 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

Bible, quoted and referred to, continued : 

Zechariah v. 6-11, " Women with the ephah," 142M. 

'• 8, " The weight of lead upon the mouth thereof," 

130. 
*• 9, "The wind is in their w^ings . . . like the 

wings of a stork," i^zn. 
" ii» " Set there on its own base," 130. 

" xi. 7, " I will feed the flock of slaughter," 132. 

" 12, " If ye think good, give me my price . . . 

pieces of silver" (motto), 132. 
Malachi iv. 2, " Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his 

wings," 69. 
Matt. iv. 3, •* Command that these be made bread," 12S. 
4, " Man . . . live by bread alone," 161. 
V. 9, " Blessed are the peacemakers," 163. 
vi. 24, " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," 150. 

25, " Is not the life more than meat?" 154. 
vii. 10, *• If he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent ?" 

128. 
xii. 30, " He that gathereth not . . . scattereth," 136. 
XV. 27, " The dogs eat of the crumbs," 154. 
xvi. 25, "Whosoever . . . lose his life . . . shall find 

it," 13. 
XX. 13, '• Unto this last as even unto thee " (motto) , 167. 
xxvii. 7, •' The potter's field to bury strangers in," 58. 
Acts ili. 14, " Ye denied the Holy One and the Just," 71 . 
" vii. 27, " Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us."* 
6gn. 
I Cor. XV. 31, " I die daily," 25. 
Gal. vi. 7, " What a man soweth . . . reap," 148. 
I Tim. vi. 10, " The love of money the root of all evil," 100. 
James iii. 18, •* Sown in peace of them that make peace, 163. 

'• V. 4, " Hire . . . kept back by fraud," 153. 
Jude 12, '* Clouds they are without water," 141. 
Rev. xii. 7, '* War in Heaven," 150. 
" xxi. 7, '* Water of life," 73. 

Bishops, equality of salary among, 18. 

Blackmail, old methods of, 74. 

Blood, circulation of wealth and, compared, 47-8. 



INDEX. 



175 



Blood, the " red ink " of starvation, 126. 
Bombs, are they produce ? 104. 

" price of, ib. 

" production of peaches and (illustration), 147. 
Borromeo, St. Carlo, tomb of, Milan, 116. 
Bread, price of, and the corn laws, 93-94. 
Building, true economy of good, 40. 
Bulbs, reproduction of nothing but (modern political economy) , 

139. 
Bulk, as affecting price and value, wo.n. 
Burial, state ; a dignity not a disgrace, /r^yC xix. 
Buying, what to consider in, 165. 
Byzants, 63. 

Californian miner, drowned by his belt of gold (illustration), 

117. 
Capacity, accumulation of, 120. 

" to use, no wealth without it, ii8. 
Capital, meaning of, 139. 

'* power of, as lord of toil, to be checked, 99. 

*' " destructive, 141. 

" reproduces itself, 139. 

" the root only, and dead till it bears fruit, ib. 

" the well-head of wealth, 141. 
Capitalists, unjust wars supported by their wealth, 147^. 
Caput vivum et mortuum, 139. 
Carlyle quoted, " Fritz is with us, he is worth 50,000 men," 

84«. 
Catallactics (exchange), science of, 127. 
Centaurs, parentage of the, 142. 
Character is inherited or induced, 152. 

" material wealth and, antagonistic, 122. 

" true political economy should develop, ib. 

Cheapness and dearness of labor and things, 134. 
Cheating, wealth may indicate, 56. 



1^6 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

Children, delicate, and manufactures, their " protection ' 
(illustration), 93^. 
" labor of bearing and rearing, noble, 137. 

" large families of, their strength, 137. 

" leaping over their own shadows (illustration), 144. 

Choice and rule, justice of, 69«. 
Christ, Barabbas chosen before, 77. 
Christopher Sly. See s. Shakespeare. 
Church. See s. Clergymen. 
Cicero, wealth defined \)y^pref. xi. 
Circulation of wealth and blood compared, 47-48. 
Clan, esprit de corps of a Highland, 15. 
Classical education, English respect for a, 112. 
Clergymen, respect for, on what based, ■zbseqq. 
Clouds without water (Jude 12) destructive, 141. 
Colonization, over-population and, 155. 
Commerce, despised, and why, 24-25, 
" good faith, the root of, 33. 

" heroismo and martyrdoms even in, 29. 

Commissions, all secret, deprecated, 129. 
Commodities, exchangeable, value of, 78;?. 

" for sale only or consumption? 103. 

Competition, a law of death, 98. 

" free trade and, 93??. 

" oppression of, recoils on the oppressor, 95. 

" wages as affected by, ib. 

Constructive, meaning of the word, 136. 
Consumption, absolute, productive, wise, i38«. 

" aim of all, is life, 149. 

" production aims at, not only at sale, 103 and n. 

" " crowned by it, 144. 

" " tested by it, 149. 

" selfish and unselfish, 147. 

Contentment in " that station of life," etc., 162. 
Co-operation, a law of life, 98. 
Corn laws, repeal of the, 93. 



INDEX. 1 7 7 

Cornelia, " These are my jewels," 64. 

Corpse, can things be possessed by a ? 116, 117 and n. 

Cotton spinner, can his employees have esprit de corps? 16. 

Country, which is the richest ? 150. 

Covetousness, unjust war and, x^-jn. 

Credit, modern system of, 74. 

Crowns for life saved, why not for life nobly formed ? 137. 

Currency. See s. Money. 

Custom-houses. See s. Free Trade. 

Dante, quoted or referred to — 
" L'uno in Eterno," 100. 
Geryon, " I'aer a se raccolse," 142 and n. 
on the stars eagle-eyed and winged, 75. 
Plutus inarticulate, and why, \^2.n. 
David counting the price of the water, 131. 
Dearness of article and cheapness of labor, 135. 
Death, " due occasions " of, o^oseqq. 

" ill-gotten wealth ends only in, 66 67. 

" knowledge of, when to die means knowledge of how to 

live, 31. 
" pursued by or pursuing us. 67. 
" " by us (Tisiphone), I33«. 

" the requisites of, i33«. 
" the wealthy are often useful only in, 121. 
Demand, author's definition of, iii«. 
" constancy of and price, iii«. 
" moral element in, io8«. 
" price of labor regulated by, lyseqq. 
" romanticity of most of our demands, 130. 
" supply and, a law for beasts, not men, yy. 
" *' as affecting over- and under-pay, 78-79. 

" " not an absolute law, 71-73. 

" " steadiness of, desirable, 20, 21. 

Demas, silver mine of, 141. 
Desert, the, has its function, 160. 



lyS "UNTO THIS LAST." 

Desert. See s. Island. 

Desire, and need, distinct, 130. 

Destructive, meaning of, 136. 

Diamonds, needles and, supposed exchange of, 127. 

Dickens, caricature of, always true, I3«. 

" " Bleak House" (Esther and Charlie), ib. 

" " Hard Times," its value, ib. 

" " Master Humphrey's Clock " (Miss Brass and the 
Marchioness), ib. 
dLKacTTig, 6g?i. 
Dionusos, Bacchus and, 119. 
Disposition as affecting demand, io2>n. 
Dura plains, 58. 

Economy in the household, 40. 

" ishouse-law,^rif/'. xi., 164. 
" law of, life the aim of all substance, 165. 
Education, classical, 112. 

" goverment, what it should include, pre/, xvi and n. 

" of the poor, 153. 
" technical, /r^yi xvii. 

See s. Ethics. 
Emotion in art, S^n. 
Employment, a necessary luxury, g6n. 
" finding, ib. 

See s. Master Workman. 
Engine, the eternal, of nature, 160. 
England, future of wealth of, in her sons, 64. 

" oak enough for crowns in honor of lives both saved 

and created, 137;?. 
" steel of, 93^. 

" to become one large manufacturing town? 159. 
Enjoyment, on what dependent, 166. 
Envy, loss to science through, 84??. 
Equality impossible, 98. 
Equity, the meaning of, 6gn, 



INDEX. 179 

Esprit de corps in a regiment, why not in a factory? \z^seqq. 
Ethics in education, enforce gentleness and justice,//-^, xvii. 
Exchange, accurate, the only just payment, yZseqq. 

" price and, 124. 

" profit impossible in just, 124. 

" in, means loss to somebody, 125, 

" the science of, founded on some one's ignorance, 
127-128. 

" true law of just, 129. 
Expediency, act not according to, but justice, 8. 

Farmer, duty of a, 40. 

Fear of loss, not the only motive of human action, pfe/. xiv 

and n. 
Fee first or duty first, the test of a man, 31, 32. 
Filigree work defined, io6«. 
Fish live by law of supply and demand, 77 n. 

" none in hell, 128-129. 
Fisher and hunter, supposed exchange of, their game (Ricardo 

quoted), iio-iii. 
Foreign loans, war and, 147/2. 
Fortune, mediaeval wheel of, 143. 
Fowler's glass, birds and the (illustration), 144. 
Free trade, advocated, reciprocal or not, 93«. 
" Fritz is with us — worth 50,000 men," 84^. 
Furrows of more value than the plough that made them, 140. 

Gardening, productive labor of, I45«. 

Generalships, not put up to auction, 18. 

Geryon. See s. Dante. 

God, the only light for rich and poor, 68. 

Golconda, adamant of, 64. 

Gold, invisible, its power, 61. 

" price of, on what dependent, iii«. 
Government, a law of life, 98. 

See s. Education, Manufactures, Schools, Work. 



i8o " UNTO THIS LAST'' 

Gracchi. See s. Cornelia. 

Granary, function of a, to store for distribution, not till things 

rot, 144. 
Grapes, or grape-shot? 148. 

Halters, are they productive? lo^n. 

Happiness, the greatest, of greatest number, 150. 

Hardware manufactures, illustrations, 102. 
See s. Mill. 

Health, laws of, every child to learn, /r^. xvii. 
" part of wealth, 115. 

Heart, purse and, regulation of, 131. 

Heaven, war in, 150. 

Hell, no fish in, 128-129. 

Helps (Sir Arthur), " Essay on War," io/\n. 

Herbert, George, " Church Porch," iijn, 

Highwaymen, old, and modern merchant ; their forms of rob- 
bery, 68. 

Holiness, right of the poor to, 154. 

Holy or helpful, 71. 

Home, joy in one's, 163. 

Honesty, attainable ? pre/, xiii^^^^. 

" faith in, must be recovered, ^r*?/^ -xmsegq. 
" organization of labor zxidjpref. xmseqq. 

Honorarium, meaning of, 133??. 

Hoopoe, the, typical of the power of riches, i42«. 

Horace on wealth, /r<?/". xi. 

Horse-shoeing, illustration from, 82. 

Housemaids, engagement of (illustration) , ^6n. 

Humanity, the thing to gain, 144. 

Hunger, as checking population, 151. 

Hunter, fisher and, supposed exchange between (illustration), 

IIO-III. 

Idiot, etymological meaning of, 119-120. 
Idleness, positive and negative sides of, 137. 



INDEX. i8i 

Idlers, how to be made to wovV., pre/, xviii. 

" manufacture of, ^6n. 
Imagination in art, Z^n. 
Impedimenta, the wealthy as, 121. 
Indus, sands of the, 64. 
Inequality of wealth, its power, 44-45. 
Injustice, a denial of rule, yy. 

" " in all the earth," 130. 
Ink, the blood-red, of starvation, 126. 
Interest on money, principle of, Zosegq. 
Intermittent work, its evils, -ixsegq. 
Investigation, teaching and, distinct,/;''^/, xi. 
Island, castaways on a desert (illustration), ^Zseqq. 
Ixion and Juno, 142. 

" banquet of, 141. 

" wheel of, 143. 

Jewelry, pride of, 136. 

" work on cutting, nugatory, ib. 
Joys, unpurchasable, 61. 
Judge, respect for, on what based, 2z^seqq. 
Juno, Ixion and, 142. 
Justice, absolute, is unattainable, but practical is, 77. 

" healing power of, 70. 

" essence of true wealth, Sl^^li- 

" result of, certain ; that of expediency uncertain, 7-8. 

" the true basis of conduct, id. 
Jurisprudence, human and divine, 75. 

Kings, modern idea of, yy. 

Labor, agricultural, its dignity, pre/, xix. 

" aim of, and kinds of (constructive, nugatory, destruc- 
tive), 136-137. 
" cheapness of, a misnomer for dearness of thing, 134. 
" demand for commodities is demand for, io3«. 



1 82 " UNTO THIS last:' 

Labor, divinity of true, I33«. 

divisions of, into positive and negative, 136. 
employment of, less important than production of life, 

149. 
exchangeable value of, and commodities, ySw. 
high and low, good and bad, 132. 
market price of, and money, 78«. 
national prosperity and, 138. 
nature of, as life contest, 132. 
nugatory, 136. 
organization of, pre/, x. 

" " made easy by honesty,//-^ xv. 

payment of. See s. Price, Value, Wages, 
price determined by, j-^iseqg. 

" of, how to estimate, i33«. 
profit the fruit of, 125. 

quality of, fixed, its quantity variable, i33«. 
Lawyers, respect for, on what based, 25-26. 
" their function, 76;?. 
" word-derivation, 6gn. 
Lex, etymology of, 6gn. 

Life, all substance means some human, 165. 
" art of lovely, 161. 
" consumption aims at, 149. 
" creating (by training), as great as saving it (by courage), 

I37«. 
" meaning of, as applied to labor, 132. 
" means body a?zd soul, I37«. 
" production of, tke national question, 149. 
" quiet, its loveliness, 163. 
" the only wealth, 149. 

" virtue and, the maximum of each co-essential, 150. 
Light, God's, 69. 
Literature, payment of, gin. 
Livy, ii. 16, on Valerius Publicola,/r,?/i xix-xx. 
" vii. 6, " quo plurimum posset^^ 118. 



INDEX. 1 83 

Loss, temporary, often a necessary result of our duty, 23. 
Luxury, crime a cosily , pre/, xv'xn. 

" impossible if we think of co-existent misery, 166-167. 

" wealth and, 57. 

Madonna della Salute, meaning of, 115. 
Maintenance of laborers, but of what kind ? 156. 
Manliness despises wealth and is undermined by it, 122. 
Manufactories, government, /r^/C xvii. 
Marah, waters of, 73. 

Marriage, restraint of, and over-population, 155. 
Market, " buy in cheapest, sell in dearest," 28, 59, 86. 
Masters, workmen and, reciprocal interests of, 6seqq. 
Meat, badness of, in London markets, no. 
Mercantile and political economy distinct, 38, 41. 
Merchant, duty of, in times of hardship, 35-36. 

" " to his employees, as sons, 34-35. 

" functions of, as a purveyor, -^xseqq. 

" " as employing labor, 34-36, 129, 

" selfish abuse of his duty, 54-55. 

" supposed selfishness of, reason why he is despised, 

24, zjseqq. 
fiepiGTTjQ, Sgn. 
Middlemen, i6^ti. 

Milan Cathedral, St. Carlo Borromeo's tomb, 116. 
Mill-owner. See s. Cotton spinner. 
Mill, J. S., inconsistency of, shown, io<,seqq., l^-jn. 
" " quoted : 

on capital, loi. 

" as necessary, though purchasers are not, 145. 
comparative estimate of the moralist, 104. 
consumption, 13SW. 

" and labor, demand for, 145. 

hardware merchant (illustration), 147. 
labor, definition, S-)M. 
natural scenery, its value, 159. 



1 84 ''UNTO THIS last:' 

Mill, J. S., quoted, continued : 

on political economy, its aim, 107. 
*• poor, future of the, 158. 
" self-interest, itpn. 
" thought, 84«. 
" usefulness, 105-108. 
" value, 107. 

*' wealth, no definition attempted,//"^, xi. 
«' " 107. 

" " "S- 

•* velvet as an article of production, 145«. 

Millionaires, some no more wealthy than their own strong 

boxes, 121. 
Mines, work in, who to do it, pref. xviii. 
Money-bags are not wealthy, 121. 

" difficulty of expressing value in it, does not affect the 
true principle of value, 85. 

" -gain, and mouth-gain, 144. 

" make always much of it, but not more of it, 164-165. 

" spending of, not making, the question, 138. 

" power of, imperfect and doubtful, 44, 60-62. 
Money, true nature of, defined, 5i«, 47 and «, 78 and n. 
Monopoly, effect of, win. 

Moralist, comparative estimate of, and political economy, 104. 
Mother, and starving children, 6. 
Motives, high and low, pref. yX\\seqq, xiv«. 
Mouth-gain and money-gain, 144. 
Murder, the negative labor, 137. 

Natural scenery, value of (Mill), 159. 
Need, desire and, what we want and wish for, distinct, 130. 
Needles, diamonds and, supposed exchange of, 127. 
Nobleness, the greatest, of the greatest number, 150. 

Occupation, a necessary luxury, 96«. 
Old, provision for \}a.&,pref. xviii-xix. 



INDEX. 185 

Oppression recoils on the oppressor, 95. 
dirupa, I37«. 

baov £v a(T(po6£X({) yiy' di^etap, 166. 
Over-population, local only, as yet, 95. 

Paisley, correspondent from, 93^. 
Passion, author's use of the word, S^n. 

" overlooked by modern political economists, i6. 

Patience, value of, in labor, S^n. 
Patronage of the rich, 40, 60, 93, 
Payment, just, true principles of, jgse^g. 

'* over- and under-, 79. 
Peace, beauty of, 163. 
" large families only possible in times of, 137. 
" -maker, 163. 
Peaches or bombs ? (illustration), 147. 
Pensions, state, for old and destitute,//-^/ xix. 
(pvTaXia, i37«. 
Physicians, all paid alike, x^seqq. 

" respect for, its true ground, 2c^seqg. 

Pictures, price of, on what dependent, iim. 
Plague, as checking over-population, 151. 
Plans, success of, less than truth of principle, /r<?/C xx. 
Plato, wealth defined by, pre/, x-xi. 
Ploughshare, a type of capital, 104, 140. 
Ploughs or furrows, which most important ? 140. 
Plutus. See s. Dante. 
Pocket-picking, 74. 
TTw/leZv, 164. 
Political Economy : 

author's creed in, summarized, r.v'xseqq, 

" " is not socialistic, 97. 

definition essential to, 116. 
mercantile distinct fi-om, ■^Zseqq. 
popular, a soi-disant science, i. 

" its basis plausible but fallacious, iseqt^. 



1 86 " UNTO THIS LAST:' 

Political Economy, continued : 

popular, its conclusions true but its basis false, 

" " the science of getting rich," 37. 

" justly is not, 

" self-interest the one motive of, i^on. 

" unconcerned with ethics or philosophy, 

105. 
" reductio ad absurdum of this view, 108- 

109. 
true, defined, 40. 
" final aim of, noble use of everything, 145. 
" practical and eternal truths of, 36. 
" real lessons of, 114. 
of Art. See s. Author, books of, quoted. 
Poor, claim on the rich of, 154. 

" degraded, will they insist on being ? 152. 
" disobedient children, 153^. 
" distress and wages of, 94-95. 
" education of, 153. 

" justice, not alms or sermons most needed by, 70. 
" keeping others, is the art of getting rich one's self, ^gseqq. 
" kind of character that remains, 123. 
" not unredeemable, 152. 
" may be holy, perfect, and pure, 154. 
" oppressed by misuse of riches, i53«. 
" probable future of, 158. 
" remain poor by their own fault, 153«. 
" robbing the, 67-68, 99. 
See s. Rich. 
Pope, moral standard of, pre/, xiii. 
'* quoted: 

" An honest man 's the noblest work of GoA " pref. xiii. 
" Each does but hate his neighbor as himself," 96. 
" More go to ruin fortunes than to raise," 122. 



INDEX. 187 

Population, checks on, 151. 

" increase of, in men and beasts, 151. 

" over-, only local as yet, 150-152. 

" " remedies usually suggested for, 155. 

" wealth and, 62-63. 

Possession, what is, 116. 

" wealth alone is not, 118. 

" Pot of the smallest ale," 108. 
Poverty, affected by wages, 92. 
Powder, consummation in, 140. 
-pdatc, 164. 

Preaching, justice more needed by the poor than, 70. 
Price, always calculable in labor, \yiseqq, 
" bulk and weight as affecting, xwn. 
" nature of, 123. 

" " " on what dependent, 131. 

" " " psychical and metaphysical, id. 

" what a man gives or takes not a true test of just, 86. 
Prince Rupert's drops (tulip, illustration), 140. 
Principles, truth of, more than success of plans, /r^ xx. 
Prisons, good schools mean empty, 46^. 
Production, consumption crowns, 144. 
" " tests, 149. 

" definition of, loiseqq. 

" nature of, T-SSseqq. 

" object of, seed and food, 143. 

Professions, the five great intellectual, 30. 
Proficio, meaning of, 124. 
Profit, acquisition distinct from, 125. 

" attainable only by labor, not exchange, 126, 
" etymology of, 124. 
" is in labor, not in price, 124. 
Progress, human, by individual not public effort, 162. 
Property, division of, author does not advocate, I53«. 

poor not to steal that of rich, or rich that of poor, 99. 
" security of, to be enforced, /(J. 



l88 ''UNTO THIS LAST.'' 

Prosperity, national, and labor, 138. 
Protection, free trade and, 93«. 
Prudence, jurisprudence and, 75. 
Purse, heart and, their regulation, 131. 

Qui judicatis terrain, 65, 76. 

Reap, what we sow we must, 148, 
Reciprocity and free trade advocated, 93;?. 
Religion, modern, both professed and disregarded, 100. 
Rex, etymology of, 69^. 

Ricardo, error of, on demand for labor and commodities, 145. 
" on " the natural rate of wages," x^Sseqq. 
" " usefulness and value, 109-111, iiin. 
Rich, employment to be sought by the, g6n. 
" law of counteraction of poor and, 68-69 • 
" oppress the poor by misuse of their wealth, IS3«. 
" rob the poor, 67-68, 99. 
Riches, getting of, is by keeping- others poor, 39. 
" " " methods of, 73-74. 

" race for wealth, 22, 
•' raging to be rich, 22. 
" " " " " its catastrophe, 141. 

" relativity of, 39. 
" strength of, I53«. 

" what man and country the richest, 149-150. 
Right, laws of, and those of supply and demand, 76^. 
Righteousness, marked by love of justice and truth, 77. 
" justice and equity, true meaning of, 6gn. 

Rogues, manufacture of, 46^. 
Rope, hangman's, is it productive ? 105;?. 
Royalty, true, 77. 
Rule and choice, justice of, 6gn. 

Sabbath, the, for the use of wealth, I53«, 
Sailors. See s. Island castaways. 
Saints, modern idea of, 77. 



IXDEX. 



189 



Salaries of all important labor fixed, why not also workmen's 

wages ? 17. 
Sale, consumption and, distinct, \oyi. 
Sanctity, true, or saintliness, 77. 

Sapling, planted in good and poor soil (illustration), 134-135. 
Savage, exchanging diamonds for needles (illustration), 127. 
Saving life by courage, and forming it by care, 137//. 

'* the Lady of, 115. 
Savings-banks, 115. 
Scenery, natural, cannot all be abolished, 159. 

" " love of, needs change of aspect, 161. 

valueof (J. S. Mill), 159. 
Schools, government, what to teach, /r^ xvi and n. 

" reform of, before that of prisons, 46//. 
Science, will not make men agree, 5. 

See s. Political Economy, Riches. 
"Scotsman," correspondent of the, referred to, 9i«. 
Scribblers of rubbish, not to be employed at all, giw. 
Sea, streams flowing to, an image of action of wealth, 71-73. 
Seed, production of, essential to the State, 144. 
Self-interest, in political economy, 150;/. 
" -possession, the first of possessions, 163. 
Selfishness of commerce, the true reason for the contempt of it, 

i^seqq. 
Septuagint, referred to on the hoopoe, i42«. 
Sermons, justice better than many, 70. 
Servants, domestic : 

esprit de corps of old family, 17. 

treatment of, and its results, Zseqq, 

willing, how to get, 11. 

worthless, and wealth, 61-62. 
Service, direct and indirect, 145. 

" free gift of, 80. 
Shakespeare, Christopher Sly, 108. 
Shipwright, duty of a, 40. 
Silver vases of Spain, broken into bullion to avoid duty, io5«. 



190 



*' UNTO THIS LAST. " 



Silver ware and hardware, are they produce ? 102. 
Simplicity, beauty of, 163. 
Singer, economy of voice by a, 40. 

" price of, on what dependent, win. 
Skill, author's use of the word, 84». 
Smith, Adam, " Wealth of Nations," on motives of honesty, 

pref. xivn. 
Smith, Elder & Co., publishers, gm. 
Socialism, author opposed to, 97, I53«. 
" the chaos of, I53«. 

" where more progressive, 97. 

Sodom and Gomorrah, 160, 
Soldier, esprit de corps of, and affection, 15. 
" love of, its true ground, 24. 
" professionof readiness to <^(? j/a/«, 24, 31. 
*' sword and ploughshare, /r,?/; xix, 98. 
Solomon, a Gold Coast merchant, 65. 

" his proverbs now interesting because so novel, 66. 
See s. Bible, quoted. 
Souls, noble, an element in national wealth, 63-64. 
Sow, we must reap what we, 148. 
Spain, silver vases of, broken to avoid duty, lo^n. 
Specific gravity, value compared to, 85. 

Spending money, methods of, more important than the amount 
made, 138. 
" " what to consider in, 165-166. 

Standard government, of all articles of commerce advocated, 

pre/, xvii. 
Starvation, the " red ink " of, 126. 
Starving mother and her children (illustration) , 6. 
Streams flowing to the sea, wealth and. See s. Sea. 
Strikes, political economy no check on, 5. 
Strong boxes, some millionaires no richer than their own, 121. 
Superiority of some men over others, an eternal law, 98. 
Supply and demand. See s. Demand. 



INDEX. IQI 

Taxation, burden of, and wages, 92-93. 

" unjust war and, x^'jn. 

Teaching, and investigation,' distinct, /r<r/; xi«. 
Tears, treasures heavy with, 57. 
Temptation and riches, 141. 

Theft, by rich from poor as well as by poor from rich, 99. 
Things are for use, not only for sale, 103. 
Thought, value of mere, 84«. 
Ticino, floods of the, i36«. 
ri//?/, meaning of, i33«. 
Tisiphone, the goddess, 133^, 141. 
Treasure, heavy with tears, 57. 
Truth, absolute, unattainable, 'JT. 
Tulips (illustration), 139. 
Tuscany, oil of, 93«. 
Tyranny, wealth may indicate, 57. 

vyialvo), meaning of, 133. 
Under-pay, result of, shown, ^-jseqq. 
Unemployed, work for the, 96 and n. 
Upas tree, 135. 
Use and abuse, 118-119. 

" noble, of everything, the aim of true economy, 145. 

" not sale only, the object of manufacture, 103. 
Usefulness, definition of, 106, iiZseqq. 

" dependent on opportunity, 108. 

" Ricardo on, 109. 

Valerius Publicola, Livy on, pre/, xix-xx. 
Valor, meaning of the Latin, 113. 
Valuable, things really, 113-114. 
Value, definition of. Mill, iii. 

" '* " Ricardo, no. 

" etymology and true meaning of, 113. 

" moral elements as affecting, io8«. 

" true, absolute, 113. 

" weight and bulk as affecting, iii«. 



192 



" UNTO THIS last:' 



Vanity, substance and, 115. 

Velvet, manufacture of, in grass or silk, walked on, or worn, 

145-146. 
Venel, meaning of, 164. 
Venetians, their respect for Solomon, 65. 
Venice, church in the market, inscription, /r^/". xiv«. 

" Ducal Palace, Solomon's angle, 65. 
Virgil, " splendescere sulco," 140. 

Virtue, and life, the maximum of each co-essential, 150. 
Vulgate, quoted : 

Prov. xxii. 2, " Dives et pauper, obviaverunt sibi," 6S. 
Zech. v. 9, '• Habebant alas milvi," 142W. 

Wages, competition in, gyegq. 

" difficult to fix the true amount of, in money, 84-85. 
" equality of all, essential to equality of good work, 17-20, 

gin. 
" fixed, pre/, x, pre/, xviii, xjseqq. 
" just, of advantage to master and workmen, 7. 
" " the question for the poor, g2.seqq, loi. 
" rate of, dependent on steady work, loseqq. 
" " " " natural," Ricardo on, 156. 

" rise in, will it raise the poor ? 152. 
" unjust, their result as regards labor and workmen, 
Syseqq. 
Walking, cheap (illustration), 135. 
War, as a check on over-population, 151. 
" unjust, covetousness and, i47«. 
" " supported by capitalists, ii. 

" " taxation and, id. 

Waste, guard against, 40. 
Waste-land and over-population, 155. 
Water, price of, iiin. 
Wealth, acquisition of, conditions of, pre/ xii-xiii. 

" action of, compared to streams flowing to the sea, 
69-72. 



INDEX, 193 

Wealth, actual and commercial, 41. 

" attributes of, 57. 

" character as affected by, i22seqq. 

" " what kind of, acquires it, ib. 

" circulation of blood and of, ^yset/q. 

" definition of, essential to political economy, />rc/. x-xii. 
Mill, 107. 

" " true, 118, 120. 

" dependent on capacity to use it, 118. 

" desire for, is desire for power, 43. 

" distribution of, must be discriminate, 120. 

" health part of, 115. 

" ill-gotten or well, 66. 

'' " results in death, 66. 

" " illth " and, 121. 

" inequality of, when beneficial, 45. 

" labor essential to realize, 42-43. 

" life the only real, 149. 

" mere brutally human, 143. 

" '* shadow, 142. 

" moral sources of, the question about it, 57-60. 

" national, depends on abstract justice, 56. 

" political and mercantile, inverse ratio of, 53^<?</'/. 

" possession need not be, 116-117. 

" power of, and labor, t\xseqq., 60, 99, 141 and n. 

" useless without labor, 42-43. 

" veins of true, in flesh or rock ? 63. 

" what does it indicate ? the question about it, Sl^^l'l' 
Wealthy, the, compared to dangerous eddies or their own 

money-bags, etc., 121. 
Weight, bulk or, as affecting price, iii«. 

" or worth, the same, I33«. 
Wickedness, spirit of, 130. 
Wine, use and abuse of, 119. 
Witchcraft, i, 114. 
Wordsworth quoted, " Excursion," 29. 

"Live by admiration, hope, and love," 149. 



194 



« UNTO THIS LAST. " 



Work, a necessary luxury, 96«. 

" aim of, to avoid idleness or hunger, 96«. 

" best, never done for money, 91;?. 

" government to provide, /r*?/; y.v\seqq. 

" steadiness of, and the rate of wages, zosegq. 

" too much of this good thing possible, g6n. 
Workhouse relief, not to be disgraceful, pre/, xix. 
Workshop, England to become one big ? 159. 
Workshops, government, jz>r^ xvii. 
World, the, cannot be all destroyed, 159. 

" " rising in, 163. 
Worth, weight or, I33«. 

Xenophon, wealth defined hy,J>re/. xi. 



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